In a crowded East Village restaurant called Mekka, Emmanuel Goldstein, 38, is quietly eating chicken wings at a table with nine raucous guys, most of them teen-agers. One of them is on a cell phone that he has programmed to monitor other people's calls. "Hey, listen to this one," he says, passing around the phone.
These young men are hackers, part of a global tribe whose bond is a shared obsession with exploring telephone and computer networks. Almost every week, this group dines out with the brooding, long-haired Goldstein, the publisher of 2600, a quarterly magazine named after the frequency of a dial tone that is the bible of hackerdom, and the host of a call-in radio show, "Off the Hook," on WBAI.
New York has been a major center of the hacker universe since the mid-80's, spawning personalities like the notorious Phiber Optik, who pleaded guilty to breaking into the computer system of Southwestern Bell and served 10 months in Federal prison.
"New York is a flash point," said Victor Gonzalez, the special agent in charge of the criminal division in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office. "It is home to a lot of talent."
Now a new generation of New York hackers is coming of age, kids who grew up with computers. Though most of them are male, they are diverse in class, race and family background. And though they are not organized in any formal way, they seem to be united by a belief that delving into telephone and computer networks -- like military data bases, government voice mail and corporate Web sites -- is not only fun but crucial for a free society.
Mantis Skips School; There's a Spyfest in Town
Eugene Tawiah, aka Mantis, a skinny high school junior from Woodside, Queens, is in a hotel conference room full of private investigators, military intelligence officers, corporate espionage experts and other shadowy characters who are paid to be paranoid.
"I'm just your average high school student," the 18-year-old hacker says. "I come home, do my homework and get on my computer."
But Mantis is far from average. He may well turn out to be a rising star in the fast-paced business of computer security.
At the hotel, the Crowne Plaza near the United Nations, Mantis is playing hooky from school and blowing off studying for the SAT's he'll be taking the next day.
Instead, he's giving a presentation at SpookTech 98, a one-day conference on surveillance.
Mantis's mother, Ann-Marie Bourreau, a manager at a nursing home who is an immigrant from Ghana, sits in the back of the room watching. "I think he is nervous," she says softly.
But at the front of the room, her son, in a baggy white shirt and a multicolored tie with little computers on it, seems unfazed.
He breezes through a discussion of his work with Ethical Hackers Against Pedophilia, an informal group that uses "unconventional and legal means" to help law enforcement authorities nab pedophiles on line. "E.H.A.P. is about putting our skills together to give something back," he says.
Mantis said in an interview that he met in secret with a Federal agent about every two weeks to share information, and had been involved in several cases in which suspected pedophiles had been caught.
The audience at the Crowne Plaza is waiting for the "live hack" Mantis has promised, to show how easy it can be to crack a supposedly secure system. Displaying each step on a large-screen projection behind him, he coolly gains control over the computer operating system of a hacker he knows. It takes just a few minutes, using a program he downloaded from the Internet. "Now, say this was TRW," the credit-reporting company, Mantis says with a sly grin, pausing for dramatic effect. "My credit is clean." The audience breaks into laughter. His mother smiles.
Afterward, Mantis is invited to do a similar presentation at InfowarCon 98, a major computer security conference to be held in September in Arlington, Va., and is chatted up by two crew-cutted officers who say they are from Air Force intelligence.
When Mantis started hacking about five years ago, he said later, it was like an addiction. "It was a rush," he said. "I couldn't think about anything else."
What he has learned, he said, is that there is a moral universe for hackers. "There are black hats, gray hats and white hats," he said. Black hats are those who destroy or crash systems they break into. Gray hats may use some illegal means to get into a system, but generally will not do harm once they have gained access. A white hat doesn't break the law. "I'd say I am somewhere in between white and gray," Mantis said. "I don't encourage people to hack something and destroy it."
Three days a week, after classes at the High School of Economics and Finance in the financial district, he walks across the street to Application Resources, a multimedia company that maintains more than 300 corporate Web sites and offers Internet access to individuals, among other things. He makes $7 an hour helping run the company's network and offering customer support.
"He's one of my top people," said Andrew Berkowitz, 25, the president of the one-and-a-half-year-old company. "Sometimes Eugene has better trouble-shooting ideas than 30-year-olds I am paying $90,000 a year."
Berkowitz said he often came across hackers who worked in computer security. "They are smarter than you," he said. "You are sitting there in a meeting, and they look like homeless kids. They got dirty fingernails, but they got this twinkle in their eyes like they know your whole credit history." Apart from a few pranks that Mantis has played on him -- "one time I was talking with a client and he made it appear like my whole system was crashing" -- he said Mantis had not violated his trust.
Berkowitz met him at a seminar he was teaching at the high school and was immediately impressed by his curiosity.
He offered Mantis an internship and took him under his wing. "He's a kid from modest means who has the chance to really excel," Berkowitz said. "The market is so good for people like Eugene; if he keeps out of trouble, he'll be making six figures by the time he is 21."
Mantis says he wants to go to college to study computer science. "I'm hoping that whatever happens," his mother said, "he gets a scholarship."
"These are the brightest people around. We can learn so much from people like them."
— Emmanuel Goldstein on the new generation of hackers