ed States Secret Service? And just how
widespread was this sort of thing?

Of all the major players in the Hacker Crackdown: the phone companies,
law enforcement, the civil libertarians, and the "hackers"
themselves--the "hackers" are by far the most mysterious, by far the
hardest to understand, by far the WEIRDEST.

Not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but they come in a
variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages, motives and
values.

The earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung mischievous
telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the Bell Company in 1878.

Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are
independent-minded but law-abiding, generally trace their spiritual
ancestry to elite technical universities, especially M.I.T. and
Stanford, in the 1960s.

But the genuine roots of the modern hacker UNDERGROUND can probably be
traced most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie anarchist
movement known as the Yippies. The Yippies, who took their name from
the largely fictional "Youth International Party," carried out a loud
and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous political
mischief. Their basic tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open
and copious drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over
thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, by any
means necessary, including the psychic levitation of the Pentagon.

The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rubin
eventually became a Wall Street broker. Hoffman, ardently sought by
federal authorities, went into hiding for seven years, in Mexico,
France, and the United States. While on the lam, Hoffman continued to
write and publish, with help from sympathizers in the American
anarcho-leftist underground. Mostly, Hoffman survived through false ID
and odd jobs. Eventually he underwent facial plastic surgery and
adopted an entirely new identity as one "Barry Freed." After
surrendering himself to authorities in 1980, Hoffman spent a year in
prison on a cocaine conviction.

Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of the 1960s
faded. In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and, to
some, rather suspicious circumstances.

Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to amass the single largest investigation file ever
opened on an individual American citizen. (If this is true, it i