Phiber Optik Goes to Prison --------------------------- Issue 2.04 | Apr 1994 On a bitter-cold weekend in early January, Mark Abene and a few of his friends took a road trip from his New York City home to the Schuylkill federal prison in eastern Pennsylvania. Abene, better known by the hacker handle of Phiber Optik, was on his way to start serving a twelve-month sentence for computer crimes; his friends had tagged along in hopes of postponing their goodbyes till the last possible moment. But at the prison entrance, guards whisked Phiber Optik inside before anyone could give him so much as a farewell slap on the back. And just in case his companions didn't get the message, one guard put it in plain English for them: "He belongs to us now." More than a few people are going to have a hard time adjusting to that fact. In the four years leading up to his guilty plea on one count each of computer trespass and conspiracy (based on his involvement with the hacker group known as MOD, four other members of which have been handed jail time in the past year), Phiber Optik had become a dependably public fixture of the online world. Journalists - drawn by the 21-year-old high-school dropout's colorful urban style and near-suicidal willingness to demonstrate his prowess at picking the locks on telephone-company systems - had featured him in numerous media profiles. Civil libertarians, battling the abuses of the government's hacker crackdown, had relied on him as an articulate and principled representative of the computer underground. And above all, hundreds of regular computer users had come to count on him for the expert technical guidance he dished out as a full-time support maven on New York's ECHO BBS and as a regular guest on the local radio talk show "Off the Hook." None of this high visibility managed to keep Phiber Optik out of jail, of course. In fact, it put him there. In passing sentence, United States District Judge Louis Stanton didn't dispute Phiber Optik's claim never to have damaged any system he broke into, but he insisted that Phiber's celebrity status required him to come down harder than he otherwise might have. "A message must be sent," said the judge. To many who have followed the case, however, the message is that the government's response to "the hacker threat" remains painfully out of proportion to the actual nature of the computer underground's supposed transgressions. "It's a tragedy," says Josh Quittner, co-author of Masters of Deception, a book on MOD to be published by HarperCollins in spring 1995. "I mean, think about it. If you caught some kid breaking into the school principal's office and tossing some files around, would you really send him to prison?" Phiber's address: Mark Abene, FPC/Schuylkill, PO Box 670, Minersville, PA 17954. - Julian Dibbell