The conventional wisdom on hacking goes something like this: Hackers are geniuses gone over to the dark side. They're skilled, but they lack self-restraint.
Plus, they're socially inept. They don't have a very good time of it with the opposite sex. And then there's their power to bring down the world's computer systems through a few mystical keystrokes -- a power which certainly does not endear them to the analog masses.
But hackers are people too, according to Hackers: Computer Outlaws, a documentary premiering Wednesday evening on the cable network TLC.
The film doesn't just seek to educate us about hacking -- it wants us to befriend this misunderstood lot and tell them we're all very grateful for what they've done for the world.
And what have hackers done for us lately? According to the program, they're responsible for the very tech bedrock upon which the modern world makes its millions. Hackers may not have created computers, it says, but they perfected the machines and brought them to the masses.
Or, as Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and one of the film's featured hackers, says: "We were making a difference for humanity with these little small computers."
The film also follows John Draper, aka Cap'n Crunch, the early king of "phone phreaking," and Kevin Mitnick, whose Internet naughtiness made him the FBI's most-wanted hacker in the mid-1990s.
If you're into hacking, you have probably heard these guys' stories before. They're cult heroes and their antics have been well documented. But if Hackers fails to cover any new ground, it succeeds in its effort to show how the hacking stories connect: how Draper's phones leads to Wozniak's personal computers, which leads to Mitnick's Internet playground.
Hacking as we know it began with Draper and his gang, who discovered, sometime in the late 1960s, that it was possible to break into the phone system by feeding a payphone a series of perfectly pitched tones. The phreaks, as they came to be known, first generated these sounds with toy whistles -- which came free in Cap'n Crunch cereal -- and later with jury-rigged tone boxes.
This was the purest form of hacking, where the prize was the hack itself. Phreakers didn't seek credit card numbers or the cool satisfaction of bringing down a major media conglomerate -- they wanted only to find the magical series of tones to let them into Ma Bell's inner sanctum, from where they would, somewhat anti-climactically, hold free conference calls.
Draper was the king of this phone land -- he was so good that he became a kind of celebrity, with national magazines writing about his mystical powers. Wozniak, who was then a student at the University of California at Berkeley, saw an Esquire story on Draper, and he was immediately captivated.
And that's how Woz started hacking -- he learned phreaking from Draper, and, in order to get better at it, he started messing around with circuit boards. The revolution starts about there, the film says. Wozniak gets involved in the Homebrew Computer Club, and shortly after that he builds the first Apple computer.
It's not a long leap from that Apple to Mitnick, to whom the film is kind. It suggests that Mitnick, in his efforts to outsmart the feds, was simply misguided; he failed to recognize that "the culture had changed around him" and that hacking was no longer considered a harmless pursuit.
It's a good point -- hacking is unnecessarily demonized in our society. Problem is, though, the film fails to fully convey that message, partly because these characters are so damn weird.
When he speaks, Draper flinches sporadically. His eyebrows seem to flit up and down involuntarily, and his voice can't settle on a comfortable volume. Woz and Mitnick are a different story: they seem like perfectly nice guys, but they look like outcasts. Put them in a lineup with a bunch of fellows shopping at K-Mart, and the average Joe wouldn't take five seconds spotting these two as the hackers in the group.
These are difficult statements to make; one doesn't like to stereotype. But many people who watch this program will come away feeling that hackers are freaks, and it's regrettable that so few of these social aspects are addressed.
Still, Hackers is fun to watch. At the very least, it'll make you be nice to that geek who keeps asking you out.
