Format

The 1999 cover formats were all photographs with the masthead moving to the right-hand side for the summer issue.

The price increased from $4.50 to $5.00 for the U.S. and from $5.50 to $7.15 for Canada, effective with the Spring issue.  (The Spring issue also showed the new domestic price without the cents column, which was unusual for us.)

The Autumn issue was again labeled as "Fall" in 1999 and the season got its own line on the masthead for the Winter issue.  Also, since the Winter issue came out right at the height of the Y2K panic, that season was listed as "Winter 1999-1900" as were the page numbers inside.  It was amazing to see how many people thought we really got hit by something.

The page length remained at 60 pages.

Starting with the Summer issue, our page footers changed, eliminating the appearance of season and name on every page and alternating them instead ("2600 Magazine" now appeared on even pages and the season of publication on odd pages).

The contents had the following unique titles:

  • Spring:  Tomorrow's History
  • Summer:  In Black and White
  • Fall:  Potential Felonies
  • Winter:  What Really Matters

Little messages continued to be found on Page 3, their location now in different places with each issue.  These messages read as follows:

  • Spring:  "nunavut"  An acknowledgment of the birth of Canada's newest territory in April.

  • Summer:  "respect authority"  A sarcastic statement on our part which flew in the face of everything we stood for.

  • Fall:  "Freedom Downtime"  The name of the documentary we were still editing.

  • Winter:  "empower"  A feeling increasingly experienced by those using the new resources of the Net to get word out to the mainstream, and one we had just witnessed in Seattle that December.

Letters titles again became unique with each issue:

  • Spring:  Express Yourself
  • Summer:  Chatter
  • Fall:  Enunciations
  • Winter:  People Who Can't Keep Quiet

Covers

This year's covers were entirely composed of photographic images.

They continued to each contain the "FREE KEVIN" statement in them somewhere.

Contributor credits were as follows:

Inside

The staff section had credits for Editor-In-Chief, Layout and Design (listed as Design and Layout in Summer), Cover Design, Office Manager, Writers, Network Operations, Broadcast Coordinator (changed to plural with the Winter issue), and Webmasters.

IRC Admins was added in Winter.

It was a particularly sad year for 2600 pets, with our dog Walter passing away, which prompted our Spring staff page to say: "This issue is dedicated to the memory of Walter.  August, 1985 to March, 1999."

The Winter issue had a special "Good Luck" credit in the staff box for Naftali, our resident cat who wandered away one day and never returned.

That issue also had an RIP for Krystalia, a well known hacker who had passed away that year.

The staff section remained on Page 2 for Spring and Summer and was moved to Page 4 for the remaining issues.  It had a new style and was printed in reverse for the Winter issue.

The Statement of Ownership was printed on Page 55 in the Winter edition.

Unique quotes continued to be printed in the staffbox of each issue:

Spring:  "We already are seeing the first wave of deliberate cyber attacks - hackers break into government and business computers, stealing and destroying information, raiding bank accounts, running up credit card charges, extorting money by threats to unleash computer viruses." - President Bill Clinton, the most powerful man on Earth, declaring war on hackers in a speech at the National Academy of Sciences, 1/22/99.

Summer:  "Public disclosure and dissemination of the victim loss letters was clearly designed to cause additional injury to the victims of defendant's conduct or to cause such victims embarrassment or ridicule." - 5/6/99, from a motion filed by the prosecution in the Kevin Mitnick case after letters obtained by 2600 were made public - these letters claimed that Mitnick, simply by looking at some source code, managed to cost cellular phone companies several hundred million dollars, a huge figure that was never reported to the companies' stockholders, as is required by law.

Fall:  'He is a strange, in some senses pathetic, misguided human being.  I don't hold a lot of confidence that he will turn his life around." - Mitnick prosecutor David J. Schindler now heading for a lucrative position in the law firm Latham & Watkins, on the subject of Kevin Mitnick, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, 8/16/99.

Winter:  "Hacking can get you in a whole lot more trouble than you think and is a completely creepy thing to do." - DOJ web page aimed at kids to discourage hacking (www.usdoj.gov/kidspage/do-dont/reckless.htm)

1999 was the year the "Free Kevin" movement reached a culmination, both in our pages and outside in the real world.  With every issue, more injustice was uncovered and more outrage was felt amongst our readership and, increasingly, amongst the mainstream.  We were in the midst of producing our own documentary on the subject, the title of which (Freedom Downtime) was quietly revealed in the Fall secret message on the Contents page.

Some of the responses we received, particularly from students in schools across the world, were extremely gratifying.  We printed accounts of kids teaching their fellow students (and teachers) all about the Mitnick case - and often getting a lot of interest in return.  "The things some kids are doing in school today are a real inspiration to us."

But schools were far from the only place where word was being spread.  People were talking about this at work, at home, and all the places in between.  One reader in the Navy even got a positive response when saying "Free Kevin" over a secure Navy circuit!  The message was resonating.  However, despite the many successes, we were still unable to get any interest from groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the American Civil Liberties Union, presumably either because the case was too "technical" or because they feared the bad publicity that would result from their being associated with hackers.  It was shortsighted at best, disastrous at worst.  "There is a real danger in treading too timidly."

We explained to readers our thinking in only having the "Free Kevin" phrase on our bumper stickers without more of an explanation or a URL for a website.  We wanted people to ask who Kevin was and why he needed to be freed.  In so doing, a dialogue was started and the phrase was uttered everywhere, which led to a conversation rather than just a quick visit to a website.  It worked better than we could have imagined: we even caught a phone company in the United Kingdom using the "Free Kevin" phrase in an advertising campaign.  Stickers began to show up on popular TV programs, like Felicity.  We started printing bumper sticker sightings in our Fall issue.  The hacker community had indeed gotten the word out and likely helped get Kevin's case to finally move forward.

Of course, moving the case forward didn't mean a stereotypical day in court where we all got to challenge the government's assertions that Kevin was an evil computer criminal mastermind and have him ultimately be found not guilty.  We had already learned in our experiences with other hacker cases that this just wasn't how justice worked.  When you're up against an adversary with virtually unlimited resources and you're stuck in prison with no prospect of getting out or even going to trial, it's not at all surprising when deals start to be made.  And that's exactly what Kevin was forced to do.  There really was no choice - he could either plead guilty to something and know when he would finally be released or he could continue to fight and face the prospect of an indefinite amount of time behind bars.  We remembered when Phiber Optik and Bernie S. were forced to do similar things, so we didn't begrudge Kevin one bit for this.  "After more than four years of his life lost to this, not counting the years spent trying to elude this form of 'justice' and the 1989 nightmare of being locked in solitary for eight months, it provided a sense of closure to at least know when the nightmare would end."

But getting to that point wasn't easy.  Pressure needed to be applied from a variety of sources and this is where the entire community excelled.  Global protests were scheduled for June 4th and that was a real turning point.  People from as far away as Moscow participated, which was a real shot in the arm for all of us.  "A lot of eyes were opened on that day and the hacker community took a big step into the world of activism."

In addition, we had uncovered a very interesting set of documents where various phone companies, apparently at the behest of the federal government, had claimed massive losses on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars due to Kevin's accessing of their source code.  But we discovered that NEC, Novell, Nokia, Fujitsu, and Sun Microsystems weren't reporting these massive losses to their stockholders, in violation of SEC rules.  "When the government found out that we had obtained these documents and were making them public, they went ballistic."

The truth hurt them big time.  And while there was a real danger they could double down and make things even more unpleasant for Kevin, in the end they seemed to want to just get the whole charade over with.  And so, the deal Kevin got saw his release set for January 21, 2000 and a restitution charge of $4125.  There was no mention at all of the hundreds of millions in alleged losses.  "It's amazing how quickly the damages went away when people started asking questions."  We were amazed at the trivial counts he was ultimately charged with.  We were also amazed - and outraged - at the incredible restrictions Kevin would be facing upon his release, such as not being allowed to use a computer or even a cell phone!  The nightmare wasn't quite over and evidently wouldn't be for some time.

And in what may have been retribution for all of the bad publicity, Kevin was transferred to a maximum security prison without warning.  And in an even more bizarre incident, he was woken up in the middle of the night, supposedly to be transferred somewhere else, only to wind up in the hospital after the vehicle he was in got into a high speed wreck.  None of this made it to the mainstream media, as they had lost all interest in Kevin Mitnick after his sentencing.

While that was the major story for the year, it certainly wasn't the only story.  For one thing, we were attacked by President Clinton who issued a remarkable statement detailing how evil hackers were and what a threat we posed.  We were so moved that we issued this apology: "We really do want to express our sincere regret for breaking our democracy and ruining the whole thing for everybody."  But we knew this would be the beginning of more crackdowns, not just for us but for everyone: "...we can look forward to an accelerated erosion of our freedoms and fairly open way of life."

It was a rude awakening to realize that the commander-in-chief really thought this way.  "We expect people without a clue to believe that hackers do this kind of thing.  Are we now to believe that this cluelessness extends all the way to the top?"  The prospect of a military commander assigned to battle hackers domestically was raised.  And even the comic strip Mary Worth got in on the act, characterizing hackers in a negative and unfair way.  That one really hurt.

A hacker named Zyklon who had altered the White House web page received a 15 month prison sentence, which was unusually harsh.  This only underlined the problem we were trying to call attention to.  "Relatively harmless infractions are now dealt with as forcefully as major crimes and the prison population is soaring."  It was becoming all too common and we had to remind people of the real facts.  "He didn't take away their security - they never had it to begin with."

Hackers belonging to a group called Legions of the Underground announced a campaign to cripple the infrastructures of China and Iraq and were quickly condemned by nearly every major hacker organization, including 2600.  To their credit, they backed down almost immediately.  We felt we needed to emphasize the belief that hackers were not to be considered tools of war.  It was bad enough, after all, to be described as "techno terrorists" in the mainstream media.

Of course, there were always people who thought these problems could be solved simply by calling us something other than "hackers" - like "crackers."  We were never fans of this idea: "...all of a sudden you have a word that only has negative connotations without a clear-cut definition of what the negative connotations are."

We printed "A Hacker's Guide to Being Busted" which caused some controversy.  We advised readers not to pick unnecessary fights with the Klan.  We published a list of all the words and phrases a program called "One Tough Computer Cop" watched for, as well as their explanations on what each of them meant.  We noted with interest that micro-broadcasting would soon be licensed, in no small part because of the drive to legalize low-power broadcasting that many of our readers had been involved in.

The Back Orifice hacker/security tool continued to make waves inside and outside the hacker community.  We printed a fair share of user experiences.  We discovered that our website was blocked from Intel for reasons that escaped us.  We also found that CyberPatrol blocked us by default - but simply entering our IP address rather than our name was enough to bypass that.

As always, we had our share of exposing corporate misdeeds.  We uncovered a Bell Atlantic scam that forced three-way calling on customers and tricked them into paying for it.  Meanwhile, Pacific Bell was doing everything in its power to keep callers from blocking their numbers so they could sell more Caller ID subscriptions.  We saw long delays appear in new "enhanced" 911 systems that were explained away by those running it as improvements to the system.  We expressed our disappointment with Omnipoint, the nation's only GSM carrier, who seemed to be going back on their initial philosophy of no contracts: "When these new services began, we were really hoping to see significant changes, not more of the same old crap with smaller phones."

Problems continued to be reported at Barnes & Noble by our readers with claims that issues were being kept behind the counter and out of sight in some stores.  A memo surfaced which seemed to show Barnes & Noble encouraging store employees "to place it in a secure location and in some instances remove it from the shelves of your store" if they "believe that any book we send you is not appropriate to the laws and standards of your community."  We didn't know how many (if any) stores were doing this to us but every time these kinds of reports came in, we would get an outpouring of support from both management and store workers, not to mention readers.

We got a report of issues being sold in Australia, which elicited this response: "To give you an idea of how distribution works, we have absolutely no idea how it's been getting there."  Such was the weirdness of magazine distribution.

It was a year of milestones in many ways.  We introduced our own IRC network - irc.2600.net - as another method of communication within the community, complete with geographical options in order to find people locally.  It was to be "a network for hackers, run by hackers."  We announced our third conference, to be called H2K and taking place in July 2000.  We actually lowered our subscription prices so that they were less than the newsstand price.  We debuted blue colored Blue Box shirts so that there was a literal blue box on them.  We introduced our new online store, bemoaned the impending loss of seven digit dialing, and looked forward with mild trepidation to the replacement of our old 516 area code with a totally new one (631).  We vowed to keep using 516 for as long as it was still possible.

There was a particularly disastrous feature piece on hackers that aired on MTV this year and the entire community was in an uproar over it.  The story was supposed to have been about Kevin Mitnick, but instead had devolved into a pathetic tale of pseudo-hackers claiming they could do all sorts of impossible things and being taken seriously and used as examples of the threat hackers posed.  We weren't thrilled and some readers felt it was a mistake to ever talk with members of the media.  We agreed that this had been a mistake but didn't believe cutting ourselves off was the answer because there was always the chance that somebody would get the facts right - and we needed to be heard outside of our own circles.  We concluded that the MTV debacle was "an unfortunate but necessary lesson."

And naturally, it was the year before the Y2K bug was set to hit and we were being deluged with nervousness and worst case scenarios from all circles.  We never believed any of it.  "We're being stirred into a panic by people who either have something to sell or some sort of agenda."  We warned people not to be fooled by what they were being told and to be vigilant all the time, not just during this exaggerated threat: "Any computer system can fail without warning for reasons that we haven't thought of yet."

We expressed our displeasure at consumer voicemail run by phone companies, which had numerous security issues.  We continued a running offer to trade a @2600.com account for a @mil one.  We learned that the Secret Service was reading all of the email sent to whitehouse.gov based on the quick response to a one-line threat to Clinton.  And we defended our position on a number of issues.  When called hypocrites because of our defense of hackers who may have committed crimes, we responded, "We defend people who create a little mischief with no ulterior motive or whose actions have hurt no one."  When told by a cynical reader that the hacker world was falling apart, we told them: "...the true scene has been 'turning to shit' since the day after the true scene came into being.  It wouldn't be a true scene if it wasn't."

We learned firsthand about the threat of power and media consolidation after the events in Seattle in November and December when demonstrations against the World Trade Organization took place.  We were surprised and concerned, along with much of the rest of the world, with the heavy-handed manner in which the demonstrations were shut down by the authorities.  The parallels were all too familiar.  "Why punish such relatively harmless individuals, whether they be hackers or demonstrators, with such passionate vengeance?  Could it be that their very existence constitutes a real threat that the authorities have no idea how to handle?"  The corporate media either avoided or distorted the story, leaving individuals to use technology of their own to get the word out.  The hacker world wasn't alone in being inspired by this.  People everywhere saw the potential and the face of media was forever changed.  It was long overdue.

We encouraged growth and responsibility within the community, particularly when performing actions like hacking web pages and conveying a message.  "It's a real wasted opportunity when someone actually figures out a way to access a heavily trafficked page and the only message they want to convey is how great they are."  We believed in individuality much more than we believed in being a part of a cool group.  "While there are some in the community who genuinely enjoy being in a group and getting lots of publicity, the greatest number of hackers exist in far smaller, even solitary, numbers, and they are constantly learning for the sake of learning without regard to social status or factions.  These are the ones who will always endure because nobody really knows who or where they are."


Spring:  Spring 1999 was simply a close-up of a trash Dumpster that had an interesting sticker on it - which was the first we had ever seen that directly addressed the issue of trashing.

We decided to add our own "FREE KEVIN" sticker to it for symmetry.

It was one of the quickest covers we ever put together.
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