event, the energy we had was connected, if only unconsciously, to many a great, untold effort to wrest freedom from the arms of invisible power. Some of us might have been deluded enough to think the future would thank us – it wouldn’t. There were prisons waiting for such victims of delusion.
The real morning of revelation came not with the computer, but with the modem. When I got that, I knew it was all over. The past. The old style. Australia as it used to be and the world as it once was. Over. I was about sixteen years old when this fresh dawn came in a little box that dialled up really slowly. Before the Internet, the sense of a global subculture in computing worked through bulletin boards. These isolated computer systems would be set up in, say, Germany, and you would dial in and swap messages and software. Suddenly, we were all connected. There was always a problem with the cost of these international calls, of course, but some of our friends became experts at manipulating the phone lines. They were called phreakers. There is all this nonsense about the early computer hackers stealing from banks and so on: most of the hackers I knew were only interested in pulling back some free phone time. That’s as rich as they got; but what riches, to spend the night connected to all this overseas expertise. And the sense of discovery was fairly galactic.
Within a few days of getting my modem, I had written a program to tell the modem how to seek out other modems. It scanned around the central business districts of Australia, and later other parts of the world, to discover which of the computers had modems. I knew there would be interesting things on the end of those telephone lines. I just wanted to find out what the numbers could lead you into; it was almost mathematical, seeing how the numbers could be played with. It’s not that it was subversive at that stage: it was simply a great reaching out and a great exploration of the world, and you felt you were riding on some brand new wave, the most technologically sophisticated part of industrial civilisation. It’s a grand thought, but it was a grand feeling and I can’t diminish it. The thing was sophisticated, but we weren’t, and to many of us it was like we were kids breaking into quarries or abandoned buildings. We had to see what was in there. We had to feel the rush of getting over the fence and making it inside. It was the thrill of making it into the adult world and being ready to challenge it.
That’s how hacking begins. You want to get past a barrier that has been erected to keep you out. Most of them had been erected for commercial reasons, to preserve profit flow, but for us it was a battle of wits, too, and in time we saw that many of those barriers were sinister. They were set up to limit people’s freedom, or to control the truth, which I suppose is just another kind of profit flow. We started by breaking the commercial desires of some companies, and the thrill was exorbitant. It was like the first time you beat an adult at chess. I’m amazed when I run into people who don’t understand the pleasure in this, for it is the pleasure of creation itself, of understanding something intimately and making it new. Hacking began to seem like a creative endeavour to us: it was a way of getting over the high walls set up to protect power, and making a difference. Keeping people out of the world’s computer systems was, for the people who ran them, a matter of control, much as Orwell understood the meaning of state control, and it was only a natural progression for us to go to work on them as part of our youthful attempt to explore the world.
Governments, of course, had computer systems at this time whose sophistication existed in direct proportion to that nation’s wealth and military might. For us the most interesting computer network was X.25, through which most countries ran their classified military computer sites. About eight hackers in the world had discovered and shared the access codes: it was just breathtaking to see how governments and corporations were working together across this kind of network. And the crème de la crème of the world hacking community was watching them. I was entering my later teenage years, and the Berlin Wall was about to come down and change everything; a great epochal change in the meaning of ideology that played out on the news every night. But we were already changing the world. When the TVs were switched off, when the parents went to bed, a battalion of young computer hackers were going inside those networks, seeking to create a transformation, I would argue, in the relationship between the individual and the state, between information and governance, that would come in time to partner the wall-breakers in their effort to bust the old order.
Every hacker has a handle, and I took the name Mendax, from Horace’s splendide mendax – nobly untruthful, or perhaps ‘delightfully deceptive’. I liked the idea that in hiding behind a false name, lying about who or where I was, a teenager in Melbourne, I could somehow speak more truthfully about my real identity. By now, the computer work was taking up a great deal of my time. I was beginning to get the hacker’s disease: no sleep, bottomless curiosity, single-mindedness, and an obsession with precision. Later, when I became well known, people would enjoy pointing out that I had Asperger’s or else that I was dangling somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun, so let’s just say I am – all hackers are, and I would argue all men are, a little bit autistic. But in my mid- to late teens I could barely focus on anything that didn’t seem to me like a major breakthrough. Homework was a struggle; ordinary conversation was a chore. In some way I found myself tuning out the local noise, the local weather, to maintain a sense of a frequency that was international. We saw a thousand tasks and became obsessed with exploring those early networks, the internet before the ‘Internet’. There was this American system called Arpanet, which, early on, Australians could only connect to if they were part of a university. That’s how we piggybacked onto the system. It was certainly addictive, projecting your mind across the world in that way, where every step was unauthorised. First you would have to hack the university computer system, then hack your way back out of it. While inside, you would then hack into some computer system elsewhere in the world – typically, for me at the time, the Pentagon’s 8th Command Group computers. You’d dive down into its computer system, taking it over, projecting your mind all the way from your untidy bedroom to the entire system along the halls, and all the while you’re learning to understand that system better than the people in Washington. It was like being able to teleport yourself into the interior of the Pentagon in order to walk around and take charge, like a film in which you got to bark orders at the extras in shirtsleeves sitting at banks of radar screens. Awesome was the word. And we quickly stepped away from the fantasy of it all to see that some bright new element of the future was being played with. Virtual reality – which used to be a mainstay of science fiction and is now a mainstay of life – was born for many of us in those highways we walked solo at night.
It was spatial. It was intellectual. You had to want to connect to the minds of the people who had built the paths. You had to understand the structure of their thinking and the meaning of their work. It was all wonderful preparation for dealing with power later, seeing how it works and what it does to protect its own interests. The weird thing is you didn’t especially feel like you were robbing anyone or engaging in any sort of crime or insurrection. You felt you were challenging yourself. People don’t get that: they think we were all rapaciously going after riches or engaged in some dark dream to run the world. No. We were trying to understand the scope and capacity of our own minds, and see how the world worked in order to fulfil a commitment, a commitment we all might have, to living in it fully and making it better if possible.
You would bump into your adversaries inside the system. Like meeting strangers on a dark night. I’d say there were maybe fifty people in the world at that time, adversaries and brethren, equally part of an elite group of computer explorers, working at a high level. On a typical night, you would have, say, an Australian computer hacker talking to an Italian computer hacker inside the computer system of a French nuclear complex. As experiences of young adulthood go, it was mindblowing. By day you’d be walking down the street to the supermarket, meeting people you know, people who have no sense of you as anything other than a slacker teenager, and you’d know you had spent last night knee-deep in NASA. At some basic level, you could feel you were taking on the generals, taking on the powerbrokers, and in time some of us came to feel we were in touch with the central thrust of the politics of our countries. It didn’t feel sinister; it felt natural. It didn’t feel criminal; it felt liberationist. And in the end, we had no sense of entitlement beyond that which came with our expertise. We owned the box. We
