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the time was paid for and the owner wasn't using it, he argued. I have heard the same argument applied to computer systems: they have security holes their owners don't correct, so they deserve to be hacked; hackers are performing a public service by highlighting the risks. In some ways I do believe that. If my bank is, out of arrogance or stupidity, failing to protect my money (which, after all, spends most of its time as digits floating around cyberspace), I want to know this. Emmanuel Goldstein spends a lot of time defending 2600's publication of security information and instructions for building gadgets to crack into systems on just those grounds of high-tech consumer advocacy.

One of the others at the table, a thin, sharp-featured redhead, burst out suddenly, "Oh, great. Do this right in McDonald's in front of a stranger." A chorus of voices: I'm not a stranger. They know me.

"Even worse," I said, when the babble died down, "in front of a journalist."

"You're not a real journalist," he said. The thing is, I agreed with him. But the evidence suggested I might be wrong. The others insisted that yes, they did know me, I was a journalist. One of them even had a couple of my articles on his Web page. I seem to have hacked the media.

"You're probably the Feds," he said, unconvinced. I don't know if he meant it or not. Would the Feds send a forty-two-year old female on a mission to penetrate a hacker group? For the rest of the evening, though, he referred to me repeatedly as "the Feds." Maybe half joking. Maybe.

These guys are a mixed bag. The youngest looks maybe eighteen, the oldest forty- plus, not that I'm any judge of ages, and they range from hovering jobless on the edge of the Net to being employed by the U.S. Navy. They're drawn together by the same love of computers and obsession with tinkering with their innards that sets them apart from the rest of humanity.

"Do you worry about getting caught?" I asked the cellphone programmer. He was wearing a smug smile.

"No," he said. "I'm too well protected." Perhaps he is. I still didn't even know his email address, let alone his name, where he lived, or his phone number. On the other hand, I thought he genuinely risked getting caught that night, and I wondered about overconfidence. It had only been a matter of a few weeks since one of the well-known names on this particular hacking scene had what they call an "accident with a cellular phone."

"What was the accident?" I asked the hacker who told me about it.

"He got caught."

The archetypal hacker is supposed to be introverted, solitary, unable to make human connections. And yet the hacking scene seems to me very social, especially compared to writing: they have meetings, travel to conferences, get together to go scouting for old equipment being thrown out, and chat on Usenet and mailing lists and, even more so, on Internet Relay Chat (IRC).

What they don't have a lot of is contact with women. You can have a lot of arguments about this: girls are less often encouraged to use computers; girls are more interested in social lives; girls have different expectations placed on them; girls mature faster; girls are taught to obey the rules, whereas people think breaking rules is part of growing up for boys. But the fact remains: so far, relatively few women develop the kind of exploratory, obsessive persistence that leads these guys to spend endless hours repetitively dialing phone numbers looking for modems.