Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier Read Free Page B

brought to their computer crimes.

    The following chapters set the scene for the dramas which unfold and show the transition of the underground from its early days, its loss of innocence, its closing ranks in ever smaller circles until it reached the inevitable outcome: the lone hacker. In the beginning, the computer underground was a place, like the corner pub, open and friendly. Now, it has become an ephemeral expanse, where hackers occasionally bump into one another but where the original sense of open community has been lost.

    The computer underground has changed over time, largely in response to the introduction of new computer crime laws across the globe and to numerous police crackdowns. This work attempts to document not only an important piece of Australian history, but also to show fundamental shifts in the underground --to show, in essence, how the underground has moved further underground.

    Suelette Dreyfus

    March 1997
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Chapter 1 -- 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
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    Somebody’s out there, somebody’s waiting
    Somebody’s trying to tell me something

    -- from ‘Somebody’s Trying to Tell Me Something’, on 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 by Midnight Oil

    Monday, 16 October 1989
    Kennedy Space Center, Florida

    NASA buzzed with the excitement of a launch. Galileo was finally going to Jupiter.

    Administrators and scientists in the world’s most prestigious space agency had spent years trying to get the unmanned probe into space.
    Now, on Tuesday, 17 October, if all went well, the five astronauts in the Atlantis space shuttle would blast off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Galileo in tow. On the team’s fifth orbit, as the shuttle floated 295 kilometres above the Gulf of Mexico, the crew would liberate the three-tonne space probe.

    An hour later, as Galileo skated safely away from the shuttle, the probe’s 32500 pound booster system would fire up and NASA staff would watch this exquisite piece of human ingenuity embark on a six-year mission to the largest planet in the solar system. Galileo would take a necessarily circuitous route, flying by Venus once and Earth twice in a gravitational slingshot effort to get up enough momentum to reach Jupiter.2

    NASA’s finest minds had wrestled for years with the problem of exactly how to get the probe across the solar system. Solar power was one option. But if Jupiter was a long way from Earth, it was even further from the Sun--778.3 million kilometres to be exact. Galileo would need ridiculously large solar panels to generate enough power for its instruments at such a distance from the Sun. In the end, NASA’s engineers decided on a tried if not true earthly energy source: nuclear power.

    Nuclear power was perfect for space, a giant void free of human life which could play host to a bit of radioactive plutonium 238 dioxide.
    The plutonium was compact for the amount of energy it gave off--and it lasted a long time. It seemed logical enough. Pop just under 24
    kilograms of plutonium in a lead box, let it heat up through its own decay, generate electricity for the probe’s instruments, and presto!
    Galileo would be on its way to investigate Jupiter.

    American anti-nuclear activists didn’t quite see it that way. They figured what goes up might come down. And they didn’t much like the idea of plutonium rain. NASA assured them Galileo’s power pack was quite safe. The agency spent about $50 million on tests which supposedly proved the probe’s generators were very safe. They would survive intact in the face of any number of terrible explosions, mishaps and accidents. NASA told journalists that the odds of a plutonium release due to ‘inadvertent atmospheric re-entry’ were 1 in 2 million. The likelihood of a plutonium radiation leak as a result of a launch disaster was a reassuring 1 in 2700.

    The