Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
started to proliferate in the '
80
s, including the aforementioned
414
s and the Legion of Doom in the United States and the Chaos
Computer Club in Germany. At the same time publications such as
2600
: were founded to share tips on phone and computer hacking.
The
government responded by passing a series of laws designed
to crack down in hacking, such as The Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act of
us
and The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of the
same year. Various agencies were formed in the late '
1986
s to combat
computer crime including the Computer Emergency Response
Team, a
80
defense agency whose mission was and continues to be to
investigate the growing numbers of attacks on computer networks.
The late
us
s saw a kind of running battle between
hackers and the authorities, in the form of the government and
other frustrated institutions, such as universities. In the United
States massive police operations, such as Operation Sundevil in
1980
s and '
90
1990
have been mounted against hacking. Notorious hackers such as
Kevin Mitnick, and others with handles such as Phiber Optik,
Dark Dante, Data Stream, Eric Bloodaxe, and Knight Lightning all
succumbed to arrest in this period, though hacking continues as
frenetically as before. Despite this and in spite of the possible
damage done by hackers or the dangers their activities represent,
hacks are, by and large, simply pranks. That is to say that they are
undertaken usually as a kind of game the aim of which is to outwit
the authorities. There is little sense of sophisticated political
intention in the acts or their descriptions by the hackers. Even the
ludicrous names adopted by hackers suggest a fervid imagination,
rather than anything more sinister. Indeed the names hackers adopt
suggest that much of the hacker imaginary has come to be informed
by Cyberpunk. The hacker is a creation of the culture in which he
is simultaneously condemned and fetishized.
But, the apparent playfulness of most hacking apart, as a form
of resistance it resonated with other ideas and movements. Though
demonized by the mass media and criminalized by the state, the
