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sleeper server
Thursday, June 27 2002 I think the best thing to come out of the War Against Bad People is the term "sleeper cell." The phrase has a poetic beauty to it that goes far beyond its individual words or even the idea it conveys. I hear the word and imagine these heinous would-be evil doers in some cramped Jersey apartment, looking out the window at a huge tank of god knows what. Daily the evil doer goes to his dead-end job at the falafel shop in the dismal strip mall across the street from that tank, coming home each evening just in time to watch the Drew Carey Show and mark off another day on the calendar. "One day less to spend among the infidel. Soon I will Awake," he sighs between laugh-track-induced chuckles of cross-cultural common ground.
The idea of sleeper cells got me to thinking about ways to use one of my spare computers, a 233 MHz AMD K-6 built around a primitive non-ATX motherboard. Today I installed Mandrake Linux on that puppy and hid it behind some boxes in the basement (but still plugged into the brownstone's electrical lines and my network). Out of appreciation for the term "sleeper cell," I started referring to it as my "sleeper server," though a more accurate term might be "crypto-server" or perhaps even "pirate server." I plan to administer it entirely remotely, honing my Linux command-line skills in the process (and perhaps building some interesting PHP-based web experiments).
It feels good to have a machine like this "out there" on the network, always-on, infinitely-flexible, but known only to me. True, the moment it starts doing things on the internet, it's directly traceable to an IP address leased to me, but the point of this thing isn't really about the internet. I like having a development Linux environment connected to me on a fat pipe. Mind you, I have a more sophisticated Linux box right here at my feet, but it's usually turned off so as to minimize noise, heat, and electricity consumption.
My history with "covert" network equipment began in the computer labs of a "certain center of higher learning" "some years ago" (though I see there is now no statute of limitations on such things). At the time I'd perfected a technique for bypassing the hobbleware on their Macintoshes and could install anything on them that I wanted to. Since I'd just learned the basics of internet technology and wished to exceed the then-generous limitations of the First Amendment, I commandeered one of these machines and made it into a "pirate web server." (By pirate, I mean pirate as in pirate radio, not as in intellectual theft.) I proceeded to load it with a number of outrage-inducing web pages, submitted them to search engines, and then sat back to watch the server's logs to see what would happen. The server stayed up for over a week before (one would imagine) a deluge of complaints forced the sysadmins to track down and disable it. Ah, the crazy things I did back then! (I can't believe I just removed the details from this story so as to decrease the chance of disappearing into an American gulag.)
Since I've stumbled into it, I'd just like to take a moment to go off on a tangent beginning with the concept of "life imprisonment for computer hackers." It's instructive that the US Congress will rush to pass a law that can lock up a computer hacker for life even if (under the terms of this law) the hacker committed his crime twenty years ago. Yet if the top executives of, say, an Enron pull a Worldcom or an Arthur Andersen, suddenly all we hear about is the desperate need to amend the Constitution so as to save the Pledge of Allegiance.
The obvious subhumanization of computer hackers in the minds of Congressmen surely reflects a complete absence of computer skills amongst them. Anyone who has ever been truly interested in computers has also been tempted by its dark side: going places where you're not supposed to go, looking at things you're not supposed to see, and above all, doing things you're not supposed to [be able to] do (in every sense of the word!). This is the nature of the ecology between complicated systems and the people who are fascinated by them. Eventually you learn to behave yourself and play nice in the world of computers, but (like the learning of all social norms) it doesn't happen in a day.
A world in which hackers are routinely locked away for life will suffer from the chilling effect such repression will inevitably have on the spirits of the young and the computer-obsessed. Creativity comes from people who like to bend the rules and treat obstacles as if they are puzzles. Locking up the people who think this way is one of the many ways America can kill its gold-egg-laying goose.
Our nascent police state, in its zeal to force conformity on everyone, isn't heeding the lesson history teaches about the value of non-conformity. I read recently that a vibrant gay neighborhood is the "canary in the coalmine" for a healthy modern city. This is because a city that happily accepts its gays will also happily accept eccentrics, creative geniuses, and dispossessed rabble from overseas with wild ideas in their heads and gold coins sewn into their jackets. By locking up our foreigners, coercing other people's children to say "under God," intruding into the private lives of gays, and threatening computer enthusiasts with life in jail, America stands a good chance of scaring away precisely the people most qualified to (as they say) "build a brighter tomorrow." As I pointed out to Gretchen last night, perhaps the most important reason the Nazis lost World War II was that they frightened away or killed all their creative thinkers, the folks who could have invented radar, transistors, computers, Post-It NotesTM, or nuclear bombs. "Creative flight" is probably the single biggest reason repressive regimes will always lose to non-repressive regimes given enough time.
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