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(on Wikipedia)

By “The Mentor” / LoD ^[ 1 ] Legion of Doom

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me. …

And then it happened … a door opened to a world … rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought … a board is found. “This is it … this is where I belong …”

I know everyone here … even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again … I know you all. …

This is our world now … the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore … and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge … and you call us criminals. We exist without skin colour, without nationality, without religious bias … and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe that it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

(Legion of Doom)

• Published in Phrack, Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3.
• Re-published in The Hacker Crackdown – (1993 book), by Bruce Sterling – pp82-83
• Also quoted in Hackers – (1995 movie)