Introduction

Over the course of the last 50 years, a subculture of technical geeks have gone from a small regionally separated group to one of the most powerful and mysterious forces in world politics. The public’s perception of hackers has been heavily influenced through three main sources: how the media portrays them, how the government interacts with them, and how hackers represent themselves through their actions and the culture they create.

Amateur hackers of the 1970s were proceeded by engineers at elite universities and military organizations who developed the technologies of the future behind locked doors. When these advanced-for-their-time computer technologies escaped the walls of highly funded laboratories, they fell into the hands of a preexisting coterie of proto-hackers called phone phreakers. How these early hackers went from a barely noticeable nuisance to sitting in the back rooms with modern political hatchet-men in roughly 40 years is the subject of this book.

Technology has taken such a major part of everyday life that nearly everyone has some understanding of what cybersecurity is and why it’s important. Although hacking as we think of it today exists as a fairly mainstream activity, it took several decades to achieve the respect it has today. The growth of modern consumer technology, and the industry of security that has been built up around it, has been forged by a dedicated cohort of nerds with the time, financial resources, and passion to create it. (I use the term nerd lovingly and apply it to myself.)

Writing a book about something as esoteric as hacker culture and how it came became prevalent is a challenge. Defining such a diverse group that has been around in one form or another for at least a century in its modern form is a difficult answer to give. Over the years, even the term hacking has been seen as controversial, especially among hackers themselves. Depending on who hears the term, it might inspire a range of emotional responses from unearned pride to stomach-turning cringe.

Some in the hacking community may recoil at the use of this term due to how wildly overgeneralized it is. At different times, the term hacker has been used as a way to demonize us or create guilt by association, unfairly implying that all of those who find ways of subverting technology are somehow definitionally criminal. At other times, the term has been overused to the point of being cliché. Admittedly, the words hacker and hacking are easy cultural touchpoints for people both inside and outside of the global community of hackers.

In spite of their controversial nature, I have chosen to use terms like hacker, hacking, and hacking community because they are a middle ground between outsiders, aspirational observers, and the wide spectrum of experts who these terms have described over the decades. Readers of this book should therefore understand that, in many cases, there are more accurate terms for practitioners of specific types of modern security.

The relationship between hackers and their governments is a mixed bag. Modern hackers are a product of the mistrustful Cold War era, which explains a lot about why their relationship with law enforcement was so fraught. Cold War fears of communism created a broader tribalistic fear of outsiders. During the Cold War, fear of people who were considered “weird” became synonymous with America’s fear of communism.

The same sort of skepticism hackers faced in the 1970s and 1980s was a milder version of previous moral panics, such as the Lavender Scare of the 1950s in which members of the latent LGBT community were seen as a threat to American stability. During this period, hundreds of queer government employees lost their jobs as a result of McCarthy-like purges. Although McCarthy’s ultimate disgrace and public censure in 1954 were a firm rebuke of the sort of “witch hunt” politics he championed, fear of outsiders never went out of style.

As institutions of authority, governments have a natural skepticism of any person or group threatening to undermine that authority. This is true throughout the world. When I began writing this book, I didn’t want to retread well-worn paths, examining specific individuals or groups in painstaking detail. For the individuals who I cover in this book, I mention their stories only as milestones in a long and complicated history. Many of them have written autobiographies that I encourage my audience to read. They are talented professional writers who will tell their stories with higher fidelity than I would ever be able to.

Instead, the goal of this book is to examine the contours of the history of hacking as seen primarily through three different perspectives: art, government, and from the viewpoint of hackers themselves. I have also tried to take a global approach to the material in this book in recognition that hacking has never been the exclusive dominion of one nationality. In fact, some of the most talented hackers in the world come from places you may least expect.

No matter where in the world hackers come from, a government somewhere has relentlessly pursued them, be it the American government and the legendary hackers of Melbourne, Australia, or the Chilean government’s pursuit of cybernetics genius Stafford Beer. Hacking is a team sport, and to apply a nationalistic bias, especially in today’s interconnected world, would be both outdated and naïve.

What Does This Book Cover?

This book covers the following topics:

Chapter 1: A Subculture Explained A re-telling of the 1903 story of magician Nevil Maskelyne and how his live disruption of a demonstration of Guglielmo Marconi’s radio system illustrates the early roots of hacker culture, defined by curiosity, mischief, defiance, and perseverance. It also explores the evolution of the hacker community, its diverse nature, common values, and the shifting perceptions surrounding hackers.

Chapter 2: Uncle Sam and Technology An examination of U.S. government history and the pre-internet employment of hackers and engineers in various agencies, including NASA, the military, and three-letter intelligence agencies such as the FBI, NSA, and CIA.

Chapter 3: Commercializing Technology  This chapter covers the development of modern consumer technology, specifically the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), and the foundations of the modern hacking community within the phone phreaking community.

Chapter 4: Digital Disruption  In the 1970s, researchers in American tech labs began researching and theorizing ways to break the very same computer systems they were busy building.

Chapter 5: Hacker Rehabilitation  An analysis of some of the earliest hacks against the American government and how hackers got a second chance at redemption.

Chapter 6: On the Other Side of  The Wall Why exactly did hacking develop in the way it did in the United States? What were some of the conditions that led to computer hacking being so prevalent inside America’s Cold War borders?

Chapter 7: Hackers of the World, Unite! How early attempts to create computer networks developed outside of the context of North America, including a look at how some of the earliest European hacking groups got started.

Chapter 8: Electronic Delinquents American spy agencies begin to take an interest in computer networks, using emerging research into ARPANET as a model for their own classified computer systems. Law enforcement also takes an interest in the activities of hackers, testing legal efforts to crack down on them.

Chapter 9: Hackers Go Mainstream  Two of the most prolific hackers of the 1980s and 1990s are apprehended, both marking the end of an era and the beginning of a new life for the global hacking community at large.

Chapter 10: The DEF CON Effect  The acceptance of hackers continues to grow, resulting in the birth of an entire industry of computer security.

Chapter 11: In from the Coldy  The American government recognizes the potential value of embracing hackers and changes their approach to both prosecute and recruit them.

Chapter 12: Anonymous  A new strain of hacktivism surprises governments and powerful private organizations throughout the world. New approaches are developed to respond to hackers in this new age.

Chapter 13: Spy vs. Spy  American law enforcement finds an effective way of recruiting hacktivists to become informants against their own. The FBI finally finds a way to partner with hackers to achieve its national defense goals.

Chapter 14: Cybernetting Society  An analysis of the effect broadband Internet and mobile Internet-connected devices had on voting populations in the early 2010s. Hackers show their stripes in various global revolutions, becoming active participants in conflict of their own volition.

Chapter 15: Hackers Unleashed  Governments around the world begin to integrate hackers into their ranks, using their talents to influence geopolitics through military and intelligence operations.

Chapter 16: Cyberwar  Hackers find themselves in life-and-death geopolitical conflict, the implications of which threaten global stability.

Chapter 17: Politics As Usual  The world of...