An underground needs a press

Every technical culture that is kept out of the institutions builds its own way of teaching itself. For the people who took apart telephone networks in the 1970s and computer systems in the 1980s, that was a handful of publications: a newsletter, a quarterly, an electronic zine, and later their European cousins. They carried the techniques, argued the ethics, named the heroes, and - because publishing a thing is a different act from doing it - they were where the law first tried to decide what was allowed to be written down. This article is about the publications. The short essays and declarations that came out of them, from 's manifesto to , have their own article.

The Yippie newsletter: YIPL and TAP, 1971-1984

The first hacker newsletter was political before it was technical. In June 1971 Abbie Hoffman - author of Steal This Book - and a phone phreak using the name Al Bell started the Youth International Party Line, a few mimeographed sheets telling readers how to place free long-distance calls, defeat payphones and generally live at the expense of the Bell System, which the Yippies regarded as a legitimate target in their war on the establishment. The politics wore off faster than the technique. With issue 21 Bell took the newsletter out of the Youth International Party and renamed it TAP, first for Technological American Party and later, more soberly, Technological Assistance Program - by his own account, after asking what all the political material was doing in his technical newsletter. Hoffman was arrested in August 1973 on drug charges he said were planted.

TAP ran until 1984. New York Telephone tried to have it suppressed for disseminating information harmful to its business and took the matter to the state attorney general, who declined on freedom-of-the-press grounds - the argument that 2600 would have to make again, at far greater cost, a quarter of a century later. The FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) kept a file from 1973 to at least 1980, and it later emerged that at least one leading member of the staff had been cooperating with the Bureau. The run ended after a break-in and arson at the editor's home in 1983; a reader from the first issue, Cheshire Catalyst, edited the last. By then personal computers were affordable, and the thing TAP had taught its readers to do to the telephone network had a new object.

The quarterly: 2600, from 1984

2600 began in January 1984 as a three-sheet newsletter with a circulation of twenty-five, named by its co-founder David Ruderman after the 2600-hertz tone that once put a long-distance trunk into operator mode, and published by Eric Corley under the name Emmanuel Goldstein - the resistance figure in Orwell's 1984, the regime's official enemy, chosen deliberately in the year the novel was set. Corley had been arrested in 1983 over an alleged intrusion and the charges dropped; he decided the underground needed a printed forum, and he has edited it ever since. The magazine's founding year was also the year AT&T was broken up.

Two things distinguish it from everything else on this page. It is printed and sold, a quarterly on newsstands with a circulation that reached more than fifty thousand, which makes it the one part of the underground press that has always been addressed to the public rather than to . And it built an institution around itself: from 1987 the first-Friday meetings, held near payphones in more than a hundred cities so that other meetings could be called, and from 1994 the biennial Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York. Corley testified to Congress in 1993 during the debate on the Digital Telephony Bill that became CALEA, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. The magazine's stated position is that a hacker who exposes a vulnerability is performing a public service; Corley prefers the label dissident to any other.

The cost came in 2000. Corley had published an article on DeCSS, the program that stripped the copy protection from DVDs (digital versatile discs), and linked to the code; the film studios sued under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the courts - the district court in 2000 and the Second Circuit in 2001 - held that publishing the code, and even linking to it, was trafficking in a circumvention device. The decision described the magazine's own contents as instruction in exploiting vulnerabilities, which was not wrong, and enjoined it anyway. Universal v. Corley remains the case that decided how the DMCA would be enforced against publication, and it was decided against the press that had done the publishing.

The zine: Phrack, from 17 November 1985

was born on a bulletin board. Taran King ran Metal Shop in St. Louis - named for a heavy-metal radio programme - and with Knight Lightning, Craig Neidorf, had formed a group called the 2600 Club in 1985 which, by Neidorf's own account, had one lasting legacy: it gave birth to the magazine. The first issue went out on 17 November 1985 as a text file. The design decision was the important one. Rather than publish single files that vanished in the choppy distribution of the boards, the editors invited hackers to write under one masthead, so a reader anywhere could find everything in one place and a writer could reach every board at once. Phrack World News gave the scene a newspaper; the Pro-Philes gave the handles biographies; the technical articles, from the first issues onward, taught the craft.

The masthead changed hands more often than any other in this article - the magazine printed a scorecard of its own editors in issue 55 - and the changes map the scene's history. King and Neidorf edited most of the first thirty issues. In issue 24, in 1989, Neidorf published a document about the emergency 911 system copied from BellSouth, and in 1990 he was indicted for wire fraud; the prosecution collapsed when the defence showed the document could be ordered from the company for thirteen dollars, and the case became a founding cause of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Erik Bloodaxe, Chris Goggans of the Legion of Doom, took over in the early nineties; route and daemon9 in the late nineties, when the magazine published the work on buffer overflows and network scanning that the whole security industry then built tools on; staffs since. There were long silences - four issues in the whole of the 2010s - and each time the magazine was declared dead it returned.

It returned most recently in August 2025. Issue 72, dated 19 August, marked the fortieth anniversary and was released at three conferences on two continents - in Las Vegas, WHY2025 in the Netherlands, where the first printed Phrack had been released twenty-four years earlier, and HOPE in New York - in fifteen thousand free printed copies, with the layout done by the crew of another zine, Paged Out!, and articles ranging from macOS kernel research to analyses of state-sponsored intrusion groups. A bulletin-board text file from 1985 had become a printed magazine handed out by the thousand at the world's largest hacker conferences, and it still costs nothing.

The European titles

The scene was never only American, and its European press was bound up with the clubs and the connections described elsewhere on this site. The 's Datenschleuder has appeared since 1984, in the same years as the club's BTX and KGB episodes; the Dutch Hack-Tic, from 1989, grew out of the same Amsterdam milieu that put Europe on the internet, and its circle went on to found the first Dutch public internet provider. Both took the American form - the technical article, the news column, the argument about ethics - and gave it a different politics, closer to the data-protection tradition of the continent than to the libertarian one of the American zines.

What the press paid, and what it drew

Every title on this page was, at some point, the subject of an attempt to stop it: a telephone company's complaint to an attorney general, an FBI file, a federal indictment over a thirteen-dollar document, an injunction under a new copyright statute. In each case the argument was the same - that describing how a system works, or how it fails, is the same act as attacking it - and in each case the press answered that description is what a press is for. The security industry that now employs the readers of these magazines, with its disclosure timelines, advisories and conference talks, is the institutional form of the argument the underground press won, and lost, and won again, before there was an industry to have it. The magazines drew the line between a technique and a crime; the industry inherited the line.

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