Black Hat Blues (8 page)

keeping his eyes focused on hers. “A great, great book.”

“I wouldn’t think 19th century Russian anarchists would have much

to offer hackers.” She fanned herself with the book, her tone challenging

but light. “Their economic models are all based on industrial and pre-

industrial systems and we’re moving into a post-industrial world.”

“And you and I are probably the only two people at this convention

who’ll realize or care about that, but I think that book will surprise you.

There are some great lessons in there we can still apply—especially if

you’re a free software kind of girl.”

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

“As it happens I am. I like my software free as in freedom and my

beer free as in someone else is buying.”

He laughed. Hot and she could riff on Richard Stallman quotes. Very

nice. “Well, I’ll have to buy you that beer later.”

“Maybe you will.” She looked at his dolly. “Are you on staff here?”

“No, I’m just helping out. I don’t suppose you want to help me unload

a truck full of t-shirts and truck them up to the 18th floor.”

“I really don’t,” she said, smiling. “But thanks for the offer.”

“Well then, you’ll have to come to the Hacks of Rebellion talk on

Saturday night then.” He gestured towards the ceiling and, 18 stories

up, the speakers’ halls.

“I will?”

“It’s only fair. Either help with the boxes or come to the talk. That’s

my final offer. Plus it’s going to be awesome. We’ve got a major new

release the whole con will be talking about.”

“That does sound better than schlepping boxes. You’ve got yourself

a deal. And I’ll do you one better hotshot. If your release really is as

awesome as you say, I’ll let you buy me that beer.” She winked at him.

That was always a good sign.

“Then keep your calendar free, because it’s a done deal.”

“I hope so,” she said, putting the book back down on the table and

picking up another one as she turned away from him. “I’ll let you get

back to work.”

Damn he loved HOPE.

“You’re fucking kidding me!” Sacco shouted. He hated shouting, found

it almost always counterproductive, and generally liked to be the cool,

calm, collected cat in the room. “You. Are. FUCKING. KIDDING.

ME!!!”

“Sacco, calm down, man. Calm down.”

“And you guys just decided this without even talking to me.”

“You were busy and…”

“I was unloading boxes of goddamned t-shirts. I had my cell phone.

You could have called. I would’ve stopped.”

“We were pretty sure how you’d vote.”

“So you thought, ‘Hey, we know Sacco will hate this idea, so let’s just

not hear his arguments on it.’ Nice.”

“We’re listening now.”

Rick Dakan

37

Sacco looked around the hotel room. The wheezing air conditioner

was just paying lip service to the idea of cooling. The other main mem-

bers of Hacks of Rebellion were there, Bryan, fawks, ck, and Dex. But it

was Dex who was trying to calm him down. The other three just looked

like they wanted to be anywhere else but here. Right now Sacco felt the

same way—he wanted the rest of these cowardly fucks to be anywhere

but here. The five of them had started Hacks of Rebellion four years

ago. Inspired by famous and influential hacktivist groups like The Cult

of the Dead Cow, they’d wanted to find a way to put their hacking

abilities to a good cause while still maintaining the mischievous edge

that had drawn them all into hacking in the first place. Sacco, Dex, and

fawks had been over in Germany for a Chaos Computer Camp when

they came up with the idea. And yes, the mushrooms they’d eaten

probably helped, but in the sober light of morning it still seemed like a

good idea. When they got back home they roped in Bryan and ck and

started doing their thing. From the beginning most of the ideological

basis for their actions came from Sacco. The others were political in a

sort of nebulous, vaguely lefty, fight the man kind of way. They were

coders and hackers and tinkerers first, who cared about politics only

up until the moment when it came to do any serious reading or study-

ing about the issues. A devoted anarchist since high school, Sacco had

read his Bakunin and Kropotkin and Proudhon and Goldman cover to

cover. He eschewed the Sex Pistols- inspired anarchy equals punk equals

chaos aesthetic that most people associated with the word “anarchist.”

Instead he focused on the core, ultra-democratic foundations of anar-

chist theory along with its deep anti-capitalist, anti-plutocratic tenets.

He also knew better than to lay all that heavy poli-sci shit on the other

four, instead feeding them spoonfuls as needed.

For the others, it was enough that they felt they were acting with

some sort of moral justification to their actions. If they were going to

cut a few corners and break a few laws along the way, at least they could

do so in good conscience. They all worked for money and hacked for

good. Originally Sacco had argued against any kind of name or public

presence to the group—those kinds of things just attract attention. But

the others wanted to be able to brag a little about some of the things

they did (the legal ones of course), and earn some kudos from the com-

munity. So they’d settled on the name Hacks of Rebellion, and from the

beginning more than half of their time was spent on decidedly “white

hat” endeavors. Or at the very worst gray hat. They cracked some DRM

schemes; they revealed some exploits. They created some open source

crypto apps that people could use to communicate securely with one

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

another. That was the public side of Hacks of Rebellion, the one that

went to cons and gave presentations and played (sometimes successfully,

sometimes not at all) at being rock stars. In truth they weren’t nearly

as rebellious or rowdy as their reputations suggested, but that was fine

with Sacco. Reputations were in and of themselves a kind of social

engineering—hacking the hacking community.

All the while though, Sacco had pushed his political agenda from the

inside, slipping in bits of ideology and education when he could, while

working on his own, non-public projects. Not that the others didn’t

help with the secret stuff—they totally did, and without their expertise

he probably wouldn’t have gotten much finished. One of his favorites

was a set of Quickbooks hacks that would allow employees to take a

peek into their employers’ books and see what everyone was getting

paid. Sacco considered the American stigma against employees know-

ing each others’ salaries to be one of the great scams perpetrated on

the workers by the ownership class—keeping information like income

inequality secret directly deflected one of the principal impetuses to

organizing and revolt. Most of his early stuff had been in this vein—

tools and attacks to help workers strike back against their oppressors.

The problem was, no one in his target audience was getting his hacks—

most of them never learned about them, and few of those who did had

the technical skills to use them properly.

So Sacco had turned his energy towards easier and easier ways to use

apps—stuff that any schmo could run on his home computer or even

cell phone without needing to be a hard core hacker. And more and

more, cell phones had become his target of choice. Saturday’s release

was the culmination of a year’s worth of testing and work by Hacks of

Rebellion—Listnin, an easy to run Bluetooth hack that would allow

anyone out there to eavesdrop in on Bluetooth cell phone conversations.

The hacking elements were well known and developed by others, and

Sacco wasn’t breaking any new ground there. His innovation was mak-

ing it so easy to use and deploy that every worker in the world would

be able to eavesdrop on their douche-bag bosses with their earpieces

attached to the sides of their head. They had two thousand CDs burned

with Listnin loaded on them, including versions for every major phone

OS, and they’d set up a dozen servers in seven different countries for

people to torrent the file from. By the time they’d finished their talk,

Listnin would be all over the goddamned place and no phone would be

safe if it wasn’t properly secured (and very, very few of them were).

That had been the plan anyway. Now Dex and the rest of them were

backing out. They were scared, afraid they’d gone too far and would

Rick Dakan

39

get arrested. Sacco railed against their cowardice but met a wall of

downcast, ashamed resilience to his pleas. The Hacks of Rebellion had

voted and decided not to release Listnin, at least not at this time and

not in this public way.

“Well, screw you guys. I fucking quit,” Sacco said, and it felt so good.

Scary, weird, but so good. He was tired of these guys, of their whining

and worrying.

“Come on, man, don’t be like that,” said Dex. “We can still put it

out there, but we’ll do it quietly, like the other things we’ve done for

you.”

“For me? You mean with me.”

“Yeah, of course. With you. We’ll do it like the others. That’s always

worked before.”

“By your inside baseball fucking standards maybe, but not by any

rational metric! It hasn’t worked at fucking all. No one uses them,

because no one but some ‘leet-ass’ motherfucking hackers even know

they exist. It’s fucking masturbation and nothing more, man.”

“This will be different.” The pleading tone in Dex’s voice disgusted

Sacco. “We designed it to be easy to use. It’ll catch on if it’s as good as

we think it is. But there’s no reason to attach our names to it. That’s

just asking for trouble!”

Sacco swallowed the rejoinder before it escaped his mouth. They’d

decided, and he wasn’t going to change their minds. But he did have

a window of opportunity to change the future if he acted right now.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, voice filled with conciliation he didn’t

feel. “I’m probably just freaking out for no reason. But you know what,

maybe I’m right too. Let’s all just take a breather OK, let’s just calm

down and think this through for a couple hours. Then we’ll take one

final vote—I won’t even try to argue with you anymore. I’ll think about

what you’ve said, you think about what I’ve said. Meet back here in

two hours?”

Some of them probably suspected something, but they couldn’t deny

he was being reasonable and fair. They hemmed and hawed a few min-

utes, but as soon as they agreed, Sacco excused himself and headed

downstairs. He had to find two people and liberate a case of CDs.

He was glad they’d decided not to spend the time and money to get

custom labels put on the CDs, another argument he’d lost by the way,

and another decision that would come back to bite them in the ass. He

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Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues

was even more pleased that he’d copied Dex’s car keys last year and

never gotten around to telling him about it. For the rest of the day and

all of Friday he’d played the good and loyal comrade, going along with

the majority. He sulked and teased and taunted of course—if he hadn’t

they would definitely have suspected something—but not so much that

they became resentful of him. They were all still too relieved that he

hadn’t done anything stupid. Except of course he had.

They followed the Saturday keynote, which was once again former

Dead Kennedy’s front man Jello Biafra. He’d spoken at several HOPEs

in the past, usually on Sundays but he had a scheduling conflict this

year, and he always got the crowd going with his mix of political rants,

humor, and flat out visceral anger. He was even nice enough to give

Hacks of Rebellion a plug before he left the stage. They entered with

their usual fanfare (which was very unusual for HOPE): music blaring

(Won’t Be Fooled Again), and lots of yelling. They’d dressed up of

course. Variations on business suits hacked into almost unrecognizable

forms by the addition of LED screens, keyboards, speakers, and even a

pair of angel wings with old data tape for feathers. It was quite a show,

and for the first time Sacco was fully aware that this was really the only

reason these other guys did this shit anymore—the fame and attention,

the thousand yelling hackers chanting trite phrases in call and response

fashion. They did it for the bullshit.

Sacco’s original role in the presentation had been cut, but they’d

thrown him a bone and asked him to present the info on a stupid little

Microsoft Excel exploit that fawks had found. Fawks was the least adept

public speaker anyway, and so had been (as usual) put in charge of

the A/V stuff. Sacco smiled at him as he took the microphone up on

stage and looked out over the crowd of a thousand or more hackers. If

they’d drawn back the curtains, they’d have all been treated to a rather

impressive view of Midtown Manhattan. Sacco idly wondered for just

a moment how many of them had actually bothered to peak behind

those heavy drapes and enjoy the view. He knew he hadn’t. Without