Eric Corley, a.k.a. Emmanual Goldstein -- patron saint of computer hackers and phone phreaks -- is having a party.
And perhaps it is just in time. 2600, the hacker magazine Mr. Corley started when he was 23, is a decade old. It has spawned monthly hacker meetings in dozens of cities. It has even gone aboveground, with newsstand sales of 20,000 last year.
But the wild expansion of the computer and phone networks that have traditionally been hacker stomping grounds -- and an accompanying rise in electronic crime -- has made life more complicated for Mr. Corley and other members of the computer underground who claim to adhere to a higher ethical standard.
Computer security, once the exclusive concern of elite computer technicians and their mischievous hacker adversaries, is now a topic of heated public debate. A growing constituency is calling for tighter restrictions on those who roam digital networks, and tough criminal penalties for unauthorized activities -- even when they stop short of information theft.
As hundreds of hackers converged on New York City over the weekend to celebrate 2600's anniversary, Mr. Corley hoped to grapple with how to uphold the "hacker ethic" in an era when many of 2600's devotees just want to know how to make free phone calls.
(Less high-minded activities -- like cracking the New York City subway's new electronic fare card system -- were also on the agenda).
For Mr. Corley and other purists, the hacker ethic begins with the notion that "all information should be free." They view themselves as valiant holdouts against complete corporate and government control of ever-more-powerful information technologies. They hack not out of greed or malice, but out of a desire to understand the high-tech infrastructure and keep the technocrats honest -- and they take pains to do no harm.
It's an outlook that tends to run contrary to the principles of private property and ownership under capitalism. Businesses whose computers and phone systems are broken into in the interest of exploration and the greater good of society generally don't think much of hacker ethics.
Neither do law enforcement officials. "They say they're doing it for the intellectual pursuit, and that sounds real nice," says James Settle, former head of the FBI's Computer Crime Squad, who was responsible for the indictment of "Phiber Optik," an outspoken New York hacker who went to jail for computer trespassing this year. "But there are much bigger ramifications."
