This is a seminal piece of writing from the underground, forgotten by many but adored by many more. It still resonates with me and has as much meaning as it did back in the day when I first read it in Phrack Issue 7.

If you don’t know anything about this text or have never even heard of it, read it and read it carefully. It dates back to 1986 and was penned by Loyd Blankenship AKA The Mentor shortly after his arrest by the FBI for computer related crimes (more at Wikipedia).

Enjoy.

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world…
Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…
Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms.
Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me…
Or feels threatened by me…
Or thinks I’m a smart ass…
Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is
found.
“This is it… this is where I belong…”
I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

                          +++The Mentor+++

I found the text when I was switching over the new server and thought it’d probably be better if I hosted it up here on the new site instead of in the nasty old HTML.

I guess many of you have read it before, and I hope you enjoy reading it again. My main aim though is to introduce it to newer people in the industry and hope they share it amongst their peers as it still embodies the hacker ethos.

Finally a new Phrack! Phrack 64 has been released a while back at the end of May, and it’s been quite a wait.

At the beginning in 1985, Phrack started as an anarchy magazine. You can learn from the first issues how to create your own bomb or how to seriously take advantage of the world that surrounds us. You can learn from the first issues how the hacking started, in which state of mind were the editors of the magazine when the will of communicating was stronger than keeping all the fun for yourself. When you could teach so many peoples who deserved to make make fun as well. Nothing of Phrack was ever about making money or harming anyone, since Hacking is about freedom of speech and intellectual curiosity. Hackers regulate the digital exchanges happening on the network and it will never stop, because you cannot catch us, and you certainly cannot catch us all.

Before Phrack, Hacking was already existing and even all serious companies, agencies, and groups of influence in the world dealing with information privacy and security felt concerned with the topic. Hackers were the founders of the system itself, and the system decomposed into multiple entities. Students and self-made hackers followed their way in the society that often did not integrate them how they deserved to be, so harshly that nowadays Hacking is forbidden in most of the countries of our planet. The system is getting private. Some of the humans have more rights than others. Some have interests to keep, others are simply waiting for their turn.

In the last decade, Phrack took a very annoying industry-oriented editorial policy and the original spirit was in our opinion not respected. The good old school spirit as we like had somehow disappeared from the process of creating the magazine. That is why the underground got split with a major dispute, as some part of the scene was unhappy with this new way of publishing. We clearly needed to bring together again all the relevant parties around the spirit of hacking and the values that make the Underground. The Underground is neither about making the industry richer by publishing exploits or 0day information, nor distributing hacklogs of whitehats on the Internet, but to go further the limits of technology ever and ever, in a big wave of learning and sharing with the people ready to embrace it. This is not our war to fight peoples doing this for money but we have to clearly show our difference.
It is also getting more urgent that hackers use the technology to make the world a fair place to live in, and we will not let politics decide without us what is good to do. Hackers needs to express their concerns and regulate the information despite the rules imposed by self-claimed authorities, and this is the real subject of our actions.
Because of this, the Phrack Magazine always was an alternative recipient for all the Hacking community knowledge that get renewed continuously. The content is evolving in a patchwork made of multiple disciplines. Of course, programming takes a central place, but software and hardware systems evolve together, so does our protocol suite and its extensions. Reverse Engineering and Cryptography are made more and more desirable even in the mainstream society. Our own body has turned into an experimentation system that brings new perspectives on the judgment that define who we are.

Phrack will always exist and will never discriminate the origin of its contributors. The magazine is where information is the rule and discrimination does not exist, provided you complete the disruptive compliance attitude that define the Hacking identity itself.

Be original, keep the underground renewing.

Contribute to Phrack.

You can read Phrack 64 at http://phrack.org/ or get the tar.gz in original style here:

64.tar.gz