Levy_S-Hackers-Heroes-Computer-Revolution

to fix it can't get at the seventy-five-cent IC, or the oscilloscope kept in a safe. Sothe hackers would manage to get the keys to these lockers and these safes. So theycould get hold of the parts, keep the computers working, carefully replace whatthey'd taken, and go back to work.As a hacker named David Silver later put it, it was "ultra-highly-clever warfare ...there were administrators who would have high-security locks and have vaultswhere they would store the keys, and have sign-out cards to issue keys. And theyfelt secure, like they were locking everything up and controlling things andpreventing information from flowing the wrong way and things from being stolen.Then there was another side of the world where people felt everything should beavailable to everybody, and these hackers had pounds and pounds and pounds ofkeys that would get them into every conceivable place. The people who did thiswere very ethical and honest and they weren't using this power to steal or injure. Itwas kind of a game, partly out of necessity, and partly out of ego and fun ... At theabsolute height of it, if you were in the right inside circle, you could get thecombination to any safe and you'd get access to anything."The basic acquisition of every lock hacker was a master key. The proper masterkey would unlock the doors of a building, or a floor of a building. Even better thana master key was a grand-master key, sort of a master master-key; one of thosebabies could open perhaps two thirds of the doors on campus. Just like phonehacking, lock hacking required persistence and patience. So the hackers would goon late-night excursions, unscrewing and removing locks on doors. Then theywould carefully dismantle the locks. Most locks could be opened by severaldifferent key combinations; so the hackers would take apart several locks in thesame hallway to ascertain which combination they accepted in common. Then theywould go about trying to make a key shaped in that particular combination.It might be that the master key had to be made from special "blanks" unavailable tothe general public. (This is often the case with high-security master keys, such asthose used in defense work). This did not stop the hackers, because several of themhad taken correspondence courses to qualify for locksmith certification; they wereofficially allowed to buy those restricted blank keys. Some keys were so highsecuritythat even licensed locksmiths could not buy blanks for them; to duplicatethose, the hackers would make midnight calls to the machine shop a corner workspace on the ninth floor where a skilled metal craftsman named Bill Bennettworked by day on such material as robot arms. Working from scratch, severalhackers made their own blanks in the machine shop.The master key was more than a means to an end; it was a symbol of the hackerlove of free access. At one point, the TMRC hackers even considered sending anMIT master key to every incoming freshman as a recruitment enticement. The