I’m getting ahead of myself. Our problems at this time included constitutional issues. At one point, in the early ’90s, the US government tried to argue that a floppy disk containing code must be considered a munition. We scarcely knew, as we went about what felt like world-changing business, but on a small scale, that we would be tied up so quickly in freedom-of-speech issues. But we were. Sending certain strips of code or going on a plane with a bit of code tattooed on your arm essentially made you an arms trafficker. Government absurdity has always stalked the effort to make freedoms clear.
I was finding these things out for myself, in Melbourne, in the company of my friends Prime Suspect and Trax. They were the ones who spoke most directly to me in my happy submersion, because they were submerged, too. Prime Suspect said that when he first got his Apple II, at the age of thirteen, he found it to be better company than any of his relatives. Strangely, our bedrooms were more connected to the world than our classrooms, because of one very crucial and amazing thing: the modem. None of us aced our exams or was top of the class. None of us shone in the halls of academe. It just wasn’t in our natures. Something in us rebelled against rote-learning and exam-fixation. In short, we felt we had bigger fish to fry and the private means to do it. This lays down another plank in the house of correction for computer hackers: we are arrogant. Compared to policemen, lawyers, army generals and politicians, of course, the computer hacker, you might argue, is a paragon of self-doubt. But we were young and we felt we knew things. That’s for sure. We did feel certain and we did feel abundant in our small way. And arrogance in youth might be counted the budding flower of self-defensiveness.
From early on, the International Subversives wanted to attack military systems, and I invented a program called Sycophant that would run through a computer system harvesting passwords. Each night, through the summer of 1991, we wandered through the corridors of the US Airforce 8th Group Command Headquarters in the Pentagon. We tramped through Motorola in Illinois, padded through Panasonic in New Jersey, tiptoed through Xerox in Palo Alto, and swam down into the twilight lakes of the US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station. There would come a day when people would run revolutions out of their Twitter accounts, and it would feel entirely natural and democratic, but, back then, it was new and totally subversive to feel the pulse of history through a flashing cursor. The journey between the two has been a story of our times.
In the book Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier, my friend, the author Suelette Dreyfus, captures perfectly the scale of ambition that was expressed by our new breed of nerd cognoscenti. And our group, the International Subversives, was going further than any of the others in Australia, further than Phoenix and the other members of The Realm. By the time I was twenty we were attempting to enter the Xanadu of computer networks, the US Department of Defense’s Network Information Centre (NIC) computer. Under my handle, Mendax, I was working most closely with Prime Suspect. Here’s Suelette:
As both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a Melbourne University computer, Prime Suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a US Department of Defense system closely linked to NIC. He believed the sister system and NIC might ‘trust’ each other – a trust he could exploit to get into NIC. And NIC did everything.
NIC assigned domain names – the ‘.com’ or ‘.net’ at the end of an email address – for the entire Internet. NIC also controlled the US military’s own internal defence data network, known as MILNET.
NIC also published the communication protocol standards for the Internet. Called RFCs (Request for Comments), these technical specifications allowed one computer on the Internet to talk to another . . . Perhaps most importantly, NIC controlled the reverse look-up service on the Internet. Whenever someone connects to another site across the Internet, he or she typically types in the site name – say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the University of Melbourne. The computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address – the IP address. All the computers on the Internet need this IP address to relay the packets of data onto the final destination computer. NIC decided how Internet computers would translate the alphabetical name into an IP address, and vice versa.
If you controlled NIC, you had phenomenal power on the Internet. You could, for example, simply make Australia disappear. Or you could turn it into Brazil.
We got inside, and the feeling was overwhelming. Some people make the mistake of saying it’s like playing God: it’s not, because God, if he’s God, already has all the answers. We were twenty. The joy was an explorer’s joy at breaking through to a new frontier despite all the odds. I created a back door into the system for future adventures. This system was awesome, and I felt almost subdued at the connectivity on offer: for me, and this is relevant to my future work on WikiLeaks, I saw a perfect join between a mathematical truth and a moral necessity. Even in those early days, I saw that breaking through the portals of power was not just a matter of fun. Governments depended on secrecy and patronage networks to deepen their advantages, but it began to appear possible that what street riots, opposition groups, human rights gurus and electoral reform had always struggled to achieve, we could actually begin to bring about with science. We could undermine corruption from its dead centre. Justice would always in the end be about human beings, but there was a new vanguard of experts, criminalised as we were, who had fastened on to the cancer of modern power, who saw how it spread in ways that were still hidden from ordinary human experience.
Our skills made us valuable, and some of us were unable to resist the Faustian pacts we were offered. It amazed the rest of us that some hackers were working for governments – hacking was innately anarchistic – but they were, and I saw it from inside the US Department of Defense network. They were hacking their own machines as target practice, and no doubt hacking computers around the world on behalf of what they understood to be US interests. As treasure hunters with an ethical bias, we entered a labyrinth of power, corruption and lies, always knowing that we would be the ones accused of corruption if we got caught. We were a hardcore unit of three: Prime Suspect, myself and Trax, who was the best phreaker in Australia. He wrote the book on how to control and manipulate telephone exchanges.
We were anarchists, I suppose, by temperament if not by political conviction. We had started off having fun and ended up wanting to change the world. There was a developing understanding that cryptography was a liberating concept and that it would allow individuals to stand up to government, to whole governments, and that it was now possible for people to resist the will of a superpower. Our temperaments were drawn to an Enlightenment sense of liberty and we felt we were part of the way forward for technology. Many mathematicians were involved with the cypherpunks. Timothy May wrote the ‘crypto anarchist manifesto’ and John Gilmore was another founding member of the group. These guys were pioneers in the IT industry – Gilmore was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems – and they had both made money and bailed out, to focus on trying to physically realise their liberation ideals with the help of mathematics and cryptography. For instance, they wanted to come up with a new kind of digital currency, a digital coin, something that would replace the Gold Standard, which would make financial transactions cleaner and not traceable by governments. Your credit rating and your credit history would be yours and yours alone. This was the dream of cryptography: to permit individuals to communicate securely and be at liberty. (If you look at the cypherpunk alumni, you see some of them went on to invent watered-down versions of all this, such as PayPal.) If allowed to develop, I foresaw that it would permit small activist groups who were in danger of being surveilled to resist government coercion. That was the hope, anyway. That was the plan and the dream. But many of the brilliant minds of my generation of cypherpunks floated off in the dot com bubble. They became obsessed with stock options and Palm Pilots and lost the urge for real change.
Digging down into our cypherpunk mindsets, we saw that one of the great battles – our Spanish Civil War, if you like – was going to be about how we served in the effort to defend the world against the surveillance of private computer networks. Issues of freedom and the fight against oppression were located there, as surely as they once were in the hills of Catalonia,
