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DATA CRIME

For Lee, evidence of degeneracy included the hackers who boasted about breaking into American computers to steal military information, and then selling it on to the KGB. Lee had also listened to the exploits of the VAXbusters, a German group, which had broken into NASA and over a hundred other computers worldwide by exploiting a loophole in the operating system of Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX computers. The VAX, a small but very powerful machine, is widely used in science laboratories, universities and military installations.

More to the point, from Lee's point of view, the fourth generation of hackers was becoming involved in a new facet of computer programming, one that threatened everything he believed in. Far from increasing access and creating freedom for computer users, this development could only cause the door to be slammed shut on access, for freedom to be replaced by fortress-like security.

During the Galactic Party, some hackers had been demonstrating the new programs. They were called computer viruses — deadly, complex, exceedingly dangerous electronic weapons that promised to escalate the war between the underworld and the establishment.

A new virus had appeared in Holland just a few weeks earlier, creating a frisson among some of the younger hackers at the Party. Even its name, Datacrime, was an affront to Lee. But it was symbolic: the virus was designed to vandalize, to wreck data and to travel undetected from computer to computer worldwide. It had no other purpose. It was designed solely to be destructive.

Lee left Amsterdam muttering about Babylon and Ancient Rome. John Draper, alias Captain Crunch, was less bothered. He spent the remainder of his vacation travelling around Germany, taking his hacking roadshow to eighteen different cities.

There was, in fact, nothing new about computer viruses. The concept of a program reproducing itself like a virus had been foreseen as early as 1948. John van Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician and computer pioneer — he designed one of the first-ever computers, quaintly called Maniac, in the late 1940s — was interested in what was then thought of as electronically created artificial life, which he

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