George
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Suelette Dreyfus' "Underground" burns the mind
by George Smith, Crypt Newsletter
Crypt News reads so many bad books, reports and news pieces
on hacking and the computing underground that it's a real
pleasure to find a writer who brings genuine perception to
the subject. Suelette Dreyfus is such a writer, and
"Underground," published by the Australian imprint, Mandarin,
is such a book.
The hacker stereotypes perpetrated by the mainstream media include
descriptions which barely even fit any class of real homo sapiens
Crypt News has met. The constant regurgitation of idiot slogans
-- "Information wants to be free," "Hackers are just people who
want to find out how things work" -- insults the intelligence.
After all, have you ever met anyone who wouldn't want their
access to information to be free or who didn't admit to some
curiosity about how the world works? No -- of course not.
Dreyfus' "Underground" is utterly devoid of this manner of
patronizing garbage and the reader is the better for it.
"Underground" is, however, quite a tale of human frailty.
It's strength comes not from the feats of hacking it portrays --
and there are plenty of them -- but in the emotional and physical
cost to the players. It's painful to read about people like
Anthrax, an Australian 17-year old trapped in a dysfunctional
family. Anthrax's father is abusive and racist, so the son --
paradoxically -- winds up being a little to much like him for
comfort, delighting in victimizing complete strangers with mean
jokes and absorbing the anti-Semitic tracts of Lewis Farrakhan.
For no discernible reason the hacker repetitively baits
an old man living in the United States with harassing telephone
calls. Anthrax spends months of his time engaged in completely
pointless, obsessed hacking of a sensitive U.S. military system.
Eventually, of course, Anthrax become entangled in the Australian
courts and his life collapses.
Equally harrowing is the story of Electron whose hacking pales
in comparison to his duel with mental illness. Crypt News
challenges the readers of "Underground" not to squirm at the
image of Electron, his face distorted into a fright mask of
rolling eyes and open mouth due to tardive dyskinesia,
a side-effect of being put on anti-schizophrenic medication.
Dreyfus expends a great deal of effort exploring what happens
when obsession becomes the only driving force behind her
subjects' hacking. In some instances, "Underground's"
characters degenerate into mental illness, others try to find
solace in drugs. This is not a book in which the hackers
declaim at any great length upon contorted philosophies in which
the hacker positions himself as someone whose function is a
betterment to society, a lubricant of information flow, or
a noble scourge of bureaucrats and tyrants. Mostly, they hack
because they're good at it, it affords a measure of recognition
and respect -- and it develops a grip upon them which goes beyond
anything definable by words.
Since this is the case, "Underground" won't be popular with
the goon squad contingent of the police corp and computer security
industry. Dreyfus' subjects aren't the kind that come neatly
packaged in the "throw-'em-in-jail-for-a-few-years-while-awaiting-trial"
phenomenon that's associated with America's Kevin Mitnick-types.
However, the state of these hackers -- sometimes destitute,
unemployable or in therapy -- at the end of their travails is
seemingly quite sufficient punishment.
Some things, however, never change. Apparently, much of Australia's
mainstream media is as dreadful at covering this type of story as
America's. Throughout "Underground," Dreyfus includes clippings
from Australian newspapers featuring fabrications and exaggeration
that bare almost no relationship to reality. Indeed, in one prosecution
conducted within the United Kingdom, the tabloid press whipped the
populace into a blood frenzy by suggesting a hacker under trial could
have affected the outcome of the Gulf War in his trips through U.S.
computers.
Those inclined to seek the unvarnished truth will find "Underground"
an excellent read. Before each chapter, Dreyfus presents a snippet
of lyric chosen from the music of Midnight Oil. It's an elegant
touch, but I'll suggest a lyric from another Australian band,
a bit more obscure, to describe the spirit of "Underground."
>From Radio Birdman's second album: "Burned my eye, burned my mind, I
couldn't believe it . . . "
["Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the
Electronic Frontier" by Suelette Dreyfus with research by Julian
Assange, Mandarin, 475 pp. http://underground.org/book
or http://www.underground-book.com]