At 6:00am in the morning, a New York father opened his door and had a shotgun shoved in his face. Twelve Secret Service agents entered his home and held his wife in a choke hold while they entered the room of their 14 year old son ready to shoot. WHen the agents were gone, there was not a single piece of electronic equipment left in the house including telephones (Barlow 15).

Another time, upon returning home, a single mother was greeted with the site of Secret Service agents carting off the computer she depended upon for crimes committed by here 18 year old son. The agents had entered her house with guns drawn after knocking down her door with sledge hammers (Uncapher 15).

Both of these examples are the result of a two year war on hackers named "Operation Sundevil". Operation Sundevil was executed in 1990 by the Secret Service in conjunction with many telephone agencies, private agencies, and various local police forces. It generated over 150 arrests and created havoc in the computer community due to it's often violent show of the brute power and authority available to the federal government.

Today, virtually everything you do involves some kind of a computer. Your answering machine, your car engine, your watch, in the work place, and every time you make a phone call, some form of a computer handles virtually all the processes involved. With PC's nearly as common in the home as in the office, the kids of today are growing up with superior technical skills in comparison to those that are in the industry right now. What is possible with all this untapped skill? In the office, we take it for granted when our work station access's the server and pulls up files and performs millions of actions. Also, many larger stores connect with remote storage warehouses to get inventories and to place orders via the phone lines. Then there are the phones them selves, organized and watched over and controlled by a computer. With all these computers connecting and talking to each other all the time, there opens a great and wonderful door for the teenagers and young adults that feel held back and cramped by regular society. They chaff at the rules and regs of everyday life, they yearn for... knowledge.

Many people call this the information age, where information is money and power. Those that know how to get at and manipulate the huge amounts of information that are available are one up on those that can't. Many of these intelligent people are those that the media calls "Hacker's" and "Phreaker's" or "Telephile's" and a number of other names to describe people that use their knowledge of computer and phone technology to get what they want and electronically access information and special services that others may not want them accessing.

If you were to do a survey and ask what people thought a hacker was and looked like, I believe they would describe them as someone that calls other peoples computers and destroys and steals the data on that computer. Physically, they would be depicted as a seventeen or eighteen year old male with glasses, somewhat unkempt hair, no social life, and probably somewhat thin and a little taller than average. The hacker would inhabit his room, constantly working on the computer, calling NASA, JPL, and all the major networks to try to hack them. They're room, if described, would be a mess, with plates, soda cans, and clothes scattered about and a computer sitting on a desk with assorted diskettes laying around in an array of disorder. This is your stereotypical computer hacker/phreaker. The teenage kid that needs social help. This is the picture that the media paints for us and the government wants us to believe. This is what makes it so easy for the Secret Service to go around smashing down doors, confiscating electronic hardware, and arresting suspected hackers with sealed warrants and with out anyone saying, "Hey, isn't that violating their rights!?" No one cares, the image of someone who is a menace to society and a threat to national security is so well depicted that many people cheer these actions on, believing the whole while that terrible, evil people are being put away.

Is all the hype correct? No, it is much different. The true hacker culture, if you can all it that, is a very loose society composed of those of the younger generation that are interested in computers mixed in with a few of the older generation that are still around to talk about the good old days. They gather on electronic bulletin boards, called BBSs, to chat and exchange trade secrets on how to make a certain computer do this or how to remove the copy protection from that. They pass around their favorite games and write text files, called "philes" with a 'P'-'H', that tell one how to do just about anything. Many of them form clubs, called affiliations, that produce some really good computer art, music, and write electronic magazines. These groups are constantly trying to cut each other down and, to some, it makes a big difference what affiliations you have. It is a mellow sub-culture, one of late nights, and lots of time online, one of high phone bills and catching a few z's in your lecture class. The members in this elite culture come from all backgrounds. Some are rich with the best systems available, other are poor, operating off of anything they can rig together, trading ideas on how to get the most out of what they have. Some are african-american, some are caucasian, some are asian, some are native-american, it matters not. Their are no faces and no voices. Computer software translates from one language to another. Personality is shown through style of typing with such things as emotions contained within greater and less than signs, happy, sad, winking and crying faces formed from equal signs, colons, semi-colons, parentheses, and other key combinations. A whole new way of expressing your self and being able to tell just how long one has been part of the culture, or BBSing. This is the hacker culture that is so feared and misunderstood, this is the future.