By '87, a mere year or so after they plunged seriously into anti-hacker enforcement, the Secret Service had workable dossiers on everybody that really mattered. By '89, they had files on practically every last soul in the American digital underground. The problem for law enforcement has never been finding out who the hackers are. The problem has been figuring out what the hell they're really up to, and, harder yet, trying to convince the public that it's actually important and dangerous to public safety.

From the point of view of hackers, the cops have been acting wacky lately. The cops, and their patrons in the telephone companies, just don't understand the modern world of computers, and they're scared. "They think there are masterminds running spy-rings who employ us," a hacker told me. "They don't understand that we don't do this for money, we do it for power and knowledge." Telephone security people who reach out to the underground are accused of divided loyalties and fired by panicked employers. A young Missourian coolly psychoanalyzed the opposition. "They're overdependent on things they don't understand. They've surrendered their lives to computers."

"Power and knowledge" may seem odd motivations. "Money" is a lot easier to understand. There are growing armies of professional thieves who rip-off phone service for money. Hackers, though, are into, well, power and knowledge. This has made them easier to catch than the street-hustlers who steal access codes at airports. It also makes them a lot scarier.

Take the increasingly dicey problems posed by "Bulletin Board Systems." "Boards" are home computers tied to home telephone lines, that can store and transmit data over the phone -- written texts, software programs, computer games, electronic mail. Boards were invented in the late 70s, and, while the vast majority of boards are utterly harmless, some few piratical boards swiftly became the very backbone of the 80s digital underground. Over half the attendees of CyberView ran their own boards. "Knight Lightning" had run an electronic magazine, "Phrack," that appeared on many underground boards across America.