2600: The Hacker Quarterly

2600: The Hacker Quarterly, American magazine, founded in 1984 and sometimes called “the hacker’s bible,” that has served as both a technical journal, focusing on technological exploration and know-how, and a muckraking magazine, exposing government and corporate misdeeds. 2600: The Hacker Quarterly has been involved continually in the legal, ethical, and technical debates over hacking.

The magazine is closely identified with its founder, publisher, and editor, Emmanuel Goldstein (a pseudonym for Eric Corley that comes from the shadowy leader of the resistance in George Orwell’s 1984). He cofounded 2600 partly in response to his 1983 arrest for having allegedly hacked into a system that gave him access to a number of corporations’ e-mail records. The charges were later dropped, but the experience led him to channel his energies into creating a printed forum for the digital underground community. 2600 began as a three-sheet newsletter with a circulation of 25. Its name is a reference to the 2600-hertz tone that formerly controlled AT&T’s switching system. Mimicking the frequency—allowing free access to long-distance lines—was one of the first modifications learned by “phone phreaks,” the forerunners of computer hackers.

Goldstein took on the role of spokesperson for young hackers. He served as technical consultant on the Hollywood film Hackers (1995), testified before Congress, and, beginning in 1988, hosted Off the Hook, a talk-radio show based in New York City that was described as “the hacker’s view of the emerging technology, and the threats posed by an increasingly Orwellian society.”

2600 publishes articles on topics such as system entry and exploration, security vulnerabilities, protection from invasive software, the implications of new encryption techniques, the way to remove ad banners from Web sites, and the ethics of viruses. A large portion of the magazine is given over to letters to the editors; the section contains responses to previous articles and other letters (sometimes in precise technical detail), legal advice, anecdotes about authoritarian responses to hacking, and tales of hacking adventures. Since 1989, a signature of 2600 has been its featuring of photos of pay phones around the world.

The magazine has continually countered mainstream media representations of hackers as computer terrorists. It has routinely run editorials in support of jailed hackers such as “Phiber Optik” (Mark Abene, technical consultant to the magazine), Bernie S. (Edward Cummings), and especially Kevin Mitnick, who served more than five years in jail for hacking into the computer systems of major corporations and on whose behalf 2600 mounted a spirited defense.

One of the goals of 2600 is to define the “hacker ethic.” According to Goldstein, that ethic begins with the notion that “all information should be free.” It involves a hard-line stance against corporate and government control of information technologies, and it affirms the value of knowledge-seeking and technological innovation on the part of hackers. It also maintains that hackers should not damage or profit from the systems that they crack, on the principle that hackers perform a public service by exposing the vulnerabilities of electronic systems; thus, according to the ethic, those activities constitute a kind of consumer advocacy. The magazine’s political stance has been described as antiauthoritarian and, in some respects, libertarian—or, in Goldstein’s formulation, “dissident.”

The magazine is only one aspect of the 2600 community. Others include a Web site—which, among other things, chronicles the latest activities in the hacker world—a film company that produced a documentary on Mitnick called Freedom Downtime (2001), and 2600 Meetings, informal gatherings of people interested in technology that take place on the first Friday of every month in more than 100 cities worldwide. 2600 also sponsors a biennial convention called Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), held every two years in New York City.

2600 has at times found itself in legal trouble, especially because of its ongoing opposition to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which expanded owners’ control over digital forms of their creations and significantly curtailed activities that previously would have been considered “fair uses.” In January 2000 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) filed suit against 2600 for violating the DMCA. The lawsuit came about after the online version of the magazine ran a story about a program that allowed users to run their lawfully acquired DVDs on Linux systems; by extension, it would also allow the DVDs’ content to be distributed over the Internet. The story contained a link to the source code, and the magazine was thus implicated in potential copyright infringement. 2600 lost the case, which was considered to have ramifications for free-speech protections (both of the program in question and of fair use in news coverage of technology), and it raised questions as to the constitutionality of the DMCA. .