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their email address on offensive email to a female classmate.[10] Will he now become a dangerous hacker, or a software technician writing useful code? The question seems to me on a par with trying to predict whether a teenage joyrider will become a car thief or an auto mechanic, or change direction altogether and become an accountant. It's impossible to tell.

Goldstein often talks about hacking as a kind of consumer service: who but hackers will tell you that the phone company is overcharging you and why, or publish the information that a file of 20,000 credit card numbers, stolen from an Internet service provider, is floating around the Net? Some of the information they circulate is very persuasive: you don't have to see someone wave a radio scanner and pick up neighboring cellular phone conversations more than once to realize analog mobile phones aren't the place to talk about your personal secrets, even if Newt Gingrich and Britain's Royal Family seem reluctant to get the message.[11]

A lot of people get tired of the argument that hackers are performing a useful service by exposing security holes. John Austen, the detective who arrested Schifreen all those years ago and set up the world's first dedicated computer crime investigation unit, says, "If I were driving past your front door and saw it open, I don't go in and remove something and then say, ha, ha, I've removed it. What I should do is try to find you and say, you've left your front door open, please don't leave it open any more.... They go around telling everybody else about it, and they think it's fun. And there seems to be some idea, some sort of moral bug in people's brains, that this is a clever thing to do."

But sometimes it is funny. A lot of people laughed when, in 1996, the Web pages belonging to the CIA and the Department of Justice were hacked, and did again when the US Airforce and British Labour Party sites got hit.[12] Things like this are embarrassing, but they're Net jokes. (With 56,000 Netizens against the DoJ over the CDA, of course they're going to think it's funny when the DoJ gets publicly renamed the "Department of InJustice"?) What worries me a lot more is the prospect that some group of hackers might doctor a site nearly undetectably, so that small bits of disinformation would seep out to journalists and others who used the site, slowly poisoning the world's body of knowledge. This is one reason why reporting on the Net is as much about traditional journalistic skills and training as it is about knowing the Net; when, in late 1996, some hoaxer sent out a message advertising customized child pornography for sale from a forged AOL address, it took both types of skills to deconstruct the hoax.[13]

Forums do exist for alerting administrators and others interested to security risks. The Computer Emergency Response Team releases periodic alerts that every system administrator should read to find out about known bugs and fixes. More generally oriented, the Risks Forum[14] recounts tales of unexpected loopholes ready to catch the unwary, such as poorly constructed sites that return their password lists in Web searches and warnings about the Year 2000 bug, a problem concerning the pattern of programming computers to use only the last two digits to represent the year's number. Sharing that kind of information is what the Net was built for; it's valuable to all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. You could decide, perhaps, that technical information should be restricted to licensed professionals; but doing that wouldn't slow down hackers, who are going to look obsessively for the information until they find it, nearly as much as it would make it difficult for ordinary computer users to control their own machines. Yes, a kid can find out how to defeat any of the censorware products on the Net; take the information off the Net and it's still right there in every DOS manual ever printed.

Cracking things open, no matter how much persistence and technical knowledge it requires, doesn't win universal respect. Austen said in 1993, "The difficult things in technology are actually creating something yourself, not poking around in somebody else's system or trying to break a control system that somebody else has made. That's like saying that if I'm a carpenter I can make a beautiful door for your front door and I put some locks on it ... do you say that the guy who comes along with a sledgehammer and knocks it down is more creative?"[15]