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Chapter Six: Warez Dudes In which the Seventh Sense reveals a secret, dangerous architecture of connection. 1. It was my second overseas trip. I blinked my eyes as dawn broke over Europe and seeped inside the airplane. We began our descent into Amsterdam. | changed the tapes inside my Walkman. Something a bit more upbeat seemed right. Peter Gabriel. It was 1993. August. Earlier that spring I’d heard about a plan for a giant summer computer hacking conference that would be held outside Amsterdam. “Hacking at the End of the Universe” it was to be called. | can’t recall now where | had picked up news of the gathering, but it appealed to me immediately. I’d just moved to New York and had been dipping into the city’s hacking scene. The “scene” was less a boiling, hip hive of action than a group of computer amateurs, curious hangers on and early IT system engineers who would gather in the grubby basement of the Citicorp Building on 53" Street and Lexington some days after work to discuss various techniques for tricking digital systems of all types. Hacking didn't have a deeply nefarious connotation in those days; it was seen by most of us as a natural, even a healthy extension of an interest in computers. The Internet had about 10 million users at the time. The idea that, two decades later, it would connect more than three billion people or that it would put millions of dollars into the pockets of some of the people gathering in that basement was honestly unthinkable. The bible of the group was a thin, irregularly stapled, photocopied magazine published out on Long Island by a guy who used the nom-de-hack of Emmanuel Goldstein, the hero of George Orwell's novel 1984. The magazine was called “2600: The Hacker Quarterly” and it offered a compilation of ideas about how to fool around with systems of all sorts, from Atari gaming consoles to door locks. The name “2600” came from one of the earliest hacks any of us at those little meetings knew about, a famous 1970’s trick that involved using an audio tone at exactly 2600 hertz (about the pitch of a truck’s backup warning) to force the backbone routing switches of the AT&T phone system to give up access to an “operator mode” which would let the phone hacker - they were called phreakers - make any sort of call for free. The hack didn’t really offer much practical pleasure except a chance to make free phone calls anywhere in the world. Once you'd mastered the trick you pretty quickly discovered there wasn't really anyone in Bombay you wanted to call anyhow. The real appeal, the deeper joy of the game, was different: It was the sense of secret, ecstatic access. A feeling of control in the largest network on earth. At one pointa phreaker named John Draper figured out that the little plastic whistles stuffed as children’s toys inside boxes of sugary Cap’n Crunch cereal produced the 2600 Hz tone nearly perfectly. The hack made him a legend. He became known, inevitably, as 92 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018324