The Mentor’s critique of the media’s portrayal of hackers is an attempt to build a boundary between ethical hackers (a.k.a. "white hats") and unethical crackers (a.k.a. "black hats"). According to hacker Candy Man whereas hackers use their intelligence (Ex. extensive knowledge of Unix) to break into systems but will avoid harming data, crackers are dumb and get passwords using well-known techniques and do so with the intent of damaging the system. As another example of similar boundary drawing, Hafner and Markoff in Cyberpunk refer to Kevin Mitnick as a "dark-side" hacker due to his malicious activities such as tapping phone lines, personal threats and manipulation, breaking into telecom buildings, etc. Kevin Mitnick was eventually imprisoned for stealing 20,000 credit card numbers. Hackers are generally very supportive of this boundary. Phrack often interviewed famous phreaks or hackers, and about half of them would sharply criticize the new generation for their unethical and uneducated behavior. The criticism of crackers is fueled by the belief that they give hacking a bad name, but also they draw the attention of law enforcement and increase the chances of everyone getting caught.
Control C speaking to Phrack (Issue 45) about "What I think of the Future of the Underground:"
The purpose of hacking is to learn. Learn the way a computer system runs. Learn how the telephone switching systems work. Learn how a packet switching network works. It's not to destroy things or make other peoples lives a mess by deleting all the work they did for the past week. The reason the Department of Justice has crackdowns on computer hackers is because so many of them are destructive. That's just stupid criminal behavior and I hope they all get busted. They shouldn't be around. You give real hackers a bad name.
In an interview, former editor of Phrack and member of the Legion of Doom (a notorious hacker group), Erik Bloodaxe, explains that he strongly supports the hacker ethic. Commenting on the bad hackers he remarks: "I find it pretty repulsive and disgusting. I am certainly not blind to the fact that there are people out there that do it, but obviously these people have a s---ty upbringing or they are just bad people" (qtd. in Gilboa).
Interviews of Scan Man (Phrack 7), Tuc (Phrack 8), Agrajag (Phrack 12), Taran King (Phrack 20), all opposed malicious hacking and were notably critical of credit carding. In the Phrack interviews, no one ever defended credit carding. The closest thing to a defense of cracking was a passive one, where people did not say anything bad about their colleagues. So whether they were defending them or not was questionable. Phrack’s refusal to publish passwords or other codes, combined with their editorial stance and its move away from publishing "anarchy" files (like drug and bomb recipes); shows that it favors white hat hacking.
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