July 9, 1989

WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY: I’m sick of the new technohipster buzzword “cyberpunk,” but last week I promised some inside scoop on the hopefully-soon-to-be- published Mondo 2000, a cyberpunk magazine formerly called Reality Hackers.

I was fascinated by one piece in particular, by Morgan Russell, called “ATMs and the Rise of the Hacker Leisure Class.”

It comes across as a literary conceit of every bank’s nightmare: a band of New Age Robin Hoods who crack automatic teller machines to stay solvent and officially unemployed. But far from fiction, the central character is “a composite of several hackers and engineers that I know,” Russell says.

As far as Russell knows, no one has cracked an ATM with the method described in the story, an ATM reader that’s been altered so it can encrypt new information on a card’s magnetic strip. “There’s a couple of legitimate uses for the conversion from (card) reader to writer,” he says. “There’s nothing inherently wrong or illegal about it, especially if you aren’t using it for anything wrong or illegal. I had my character using it, and I just extrapolated what this could do if (the idea) were to gain currency.”

So to speak.

Russell says the ATM hack is a classic, that the person who designed the card writer has “a very straight job” and did it as a pure technological challenge without thought of ramifications.

Russell says such feats are common. He recently dreamed up a story on the possibilities of laser graffiti, imagining someone etching a big eye on the Transamerica Pyramid, for example.

“I came across a fellow who builds lasers and I described the problem,” Russell says. “He answered all my questions knowing exactly what it was for, sort of ignoring the application. It’s a certain way of thinking — you’ve got a problem, so you solve it.”

That mindset is what lets peace-loving engineers work on “need to know” projects in the military-industrial complex. But it isn’t confined to the military. Russell says he once wrote a closer look at the Captain Midnight scandal called “How to Take Over Prime-Time TV.” Captain Midnight was the guy who several years ago hacked onto HBO just to do it.

“I (interviewed) a broadcast engineer about this,” Russell says. “He criticized how it was done and described a better way of doing it, a way Captain Midnight didn’t know. This article was distributed around the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Vegas last year, in spring. They saw nothing wrong with (the story); in fact they were amused.”

But outside those who work in the industry is a hacker underground looking to form “cyberpunk cells,” as Russell calls them, and find ways to finance itself. With the money they make, hackers would invest in military-grade secure communications. “This would allow them to never meet physically,” Russell says. “Not necessarily to (plan) anything bad, but to remove themselves from the daily grind. The government would be beside the point.”

IT’S ABOUT TIME: Somehow the above topic fits in with the fact that I finally got my hands on the exhaustive three-part series in the New Yorker magazine called “Annals of Radiation: the Hazards of Electromagnetic Fields.”

If you cherish your health and have managed to cling to the belief that government or industry wants to protect it, I suggest you send for the series immediately. Written by Paul Brodeur, Part I probes the research into cancer risks caused by proximity to power lines, and how utility companies and the U.S. Navy, to name two, repeatedly were able to push through massive utility and research projects — despite enormous evidence of health risks — by discrediting the scientists who did the studies.

Some damning information in Parts I and II explores the threat of cancer by being exposed to low-level radiation caused by proximity to power lines and exposure to radar radiation.
“The attempt of the utility industry to play down the hazards of exposure … has been abetted by a reluctance on the part of many people to recognize the possibility that their health might be threatened by invisible emanations from something they regard as both pervasive and indispensable,” Brodeur says.

Part III explores the health battle around video display terminals, or VDTs, plugged into most personal computers. People have been arguing about the health hazards of VDTs for more than a decade. Users get sick and blame the VDTs, while industry apologists and vendors who make them say, “Impossible!” There’s some eye-opening stuff about vendors blocking the results of studies on VDT use.

Back issues are $3 each. Send a check or money order to the New Yorker, Back Issues Department, 25 West 43rd St., New York, NY 10036. Issue dates are June 12, 19 and 26, 1989.