ctivity had not yet been publicized, much less
criminalized.

In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" had not yet been
extended to cyberspace. Computers were not yet indispensable to
society. There were no vast databanks of vulnerable, proprietary
information stored in computers, which might be accessed, copied
without permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged. The stakes were low
in the early days--but they grew every year, exponentially, as
computers themselves grew.

By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had become
overwhelming, and they broke the social boundaries of the hacking
subculture. Hacking had become too important to be left to the
hackers. Society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of
cyberspace-as-property, cyberspace as privately-owned unreal-estate.
In the new, severe, responsible, high-stakes context of the
"Information Society" of the 1990s, "hacking" was called into question.

What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use
its computational power, or look around inside its files without
hurting anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway--how
should society, and the law, best define their actions? Were they just
BROWSERS, harmless intellectual explorers? Were they VOYEURS, snoops,
invaders of privacy? Should they be sternly treated as potential
AGENTS OF ESPIONAGE, or perhaps as INDUSTRIAL SPIES? Or were they best
defined as TRESPASSERS, a very common teenage misdemeanor? Was hacking
THEFT OF SERVICE? (After all, intruders were getting someone else's
computer to carry out their orders, without permission and without
paying). Was hacking FRAUD? Maybe it was best described as
IMPERSONATION. The commonest mode of computer intrusion was (and is)
to swipe or snoop somebody else's password, and then enter the computer
in the guise of another person--who is commonly stuck with the blame
and the bills.

Perhaps a medical metaphor was better--hackers should be defined as
"sick," as COMPUTER ADDICTS unable to control their irresponsible,
compulsive behavior.

But these weighty assessments meant little to the people who were
actually being judged. From inside the underground world of hacking
itself, all these perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or
meaningless. The most important self-perception of underground
hackers--from the 1960s, right through to the present day--is that they
are an ELITE. The day-to-day