-on. People pass in and out, are
ostracized, get bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by telco
security and presented with huge bills. Many "underground groups" are
software pirates, "warez d00dz," who might break copy protection and
pirate programs, but likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a
computer-system.

It is hard to estimate the true population of the digital underground.
There is constant turnover. Most hackers start young, come and go,
then drop out at age 22--the age of college graduation. And a large
majority of "hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe
software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while never actually
joining the elite.

Some professional informants, who make it their business to retail
knowledge of the underground to paymasters in private corporate
security, have estimated the hacker population at as high as fifty
thousand. This is likely highly inflated, unless one counts every
single teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. My best
guess is about 5,000 people. Of these, I would guess that as few as a
hundred are truly "elite" --active computer intruders, skilled enough
to penetrate sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate
security and law enforcement.

Another interesting speculation is whether this group is growing or
not. Young teenage hackers are often convinced that hackers exist in
vast swarms and will soon dominate the cybernetic universe. Older and
wiser veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are convinced
that the glory days are long gone, that the cops have the underground's
number now, and that kids these days are dirt-stupid and just want to
play Nintendo.

My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a non-profit act of
intellectual exploration and mastery, is in slow decline, at least in
the United States; but that electronic fraud, especially
telecommunication crime, is growing by leaps and bounds.

One might find a useful parallel to the digital underground in the drug
underground. There was a time, now much-obscured by historical
revisionism, when Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip,
small-scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the sake of
enjoying a long stoned conversation about the Doors and Allen Ginsberg.
Now drugs are increasingly verboten, except in a high-stakes,
highly-criminal world of highly addictive drugs. Over years of
disenchantment and police harassm