ish. The Dutch. And the
Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos Computer Club. The
Australians. They've all learned phone-phreaking from America. It's a
growth mischief industry. The multinational networks are global, but
governments and the police simply aren't. Neither are the laws. Or
the legal frameworks for citizen protection.

One language is global, though--English. Phone phreaks speak English;
it's their native tongue even if they're Germans. English may have
started in England but now it's the Net language; it might as well be
called "CNNese."

Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. They're the world
masters at organized software piracy. The French aren't into
phone-phreaking either. The French are into computerized industrial
espionage.

In the old days of the MIT righteous hackerdom, crashing systems didn't
hurt anybody. Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now the
players are more venal. Now the consequences are worse. Hacking will
begin killing people soon. Already there are methods of stacking calls
onto 911 systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing the death
of some poor soul calling in with a genuine emergency. Hackers in
Amtrak computers, or air-traffic control computers, will kill somebody
someday. Maybe a lot of people. Gail Thackeray expects it.

And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud" virus is the latest
one out. It wipes hard-disks.

According to Thackeray, the idea that phone-phreaks are Robin Hoods is
a fraud. They don't deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on the
weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome ANI (Automatic Number
Identification) trace capability. When AT&T wised up and tightened
security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby Bells. The Baby
Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so the phreaks switched to smaller
long-distance entrepreneurs. Today, they are moving into locally owned
PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full of security holes,
dreadfully easy to hack. These victims aren't the moneybags Sheriff of
Nottingham or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent people who
find it hard to protect themselves, and who really suffer from these
depredations. Phone phreaks pick on the weak. They do it for power.
If it were legal, they wouldn't do it. They don't want service, or
knowledge, they want the thrill of power-tripping. There's plenty of
knowledge or service around if you're willing t