A SHORT HISTORY OF HACKING
By Ash Mahtani and Shawn Aldridge
The story starts in the 1960s . Kind of . The age of computers , at least as we know them , is in its infancy . Over at MIT , “ hacks ” are actually a good thing . They ’ re just shortcuts that programmers use .
It isn ’ t really until 1971 that things take a turn . A man named John Draper discovers that by reproducing a 2600-hertz tone with a toy whistle from a box of Cap ’ n Crunch cereal , he can make free long-distance phone calls . This gives birth to the field of phone hacking , later known as “ phreaking ” and earns him the nickname “ Captain Crunch .” The golden age of piracy begins . Not really . Draper is arrested numerous times over the next few years . But his discovery does kick off a proverbial gold rush of activity . Even young Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ( future founders of Apple ) create “ blue boxes ” which replicate these tones .
The hacking phenomenon grows even more in the 80s with hacker groups like the European Chaos Computer Club and U . S .’ s Legion of Doom ( led by a hacker known as Lex Luthor ) being formed . By 1983 , hacking has entered the mainstream public consciousness , and the movie WarGames — starring Matthew Broderick as a hacker who inadvertently almost starts World War III — is released . By the mid-80s , congress passes the Comprehensive Crime Control Act , the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act , criminalizing various types of computer fraud and giving jurisdiction of those crimes over to the federal government .
Towards the end of the decade , Kevin Poulsen ( aka Dark Dante ) has gone into hiding after hacking a federal computer
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