Shebang:I am going to start by saying that Soggie is Starlab’s resident expert on computing. When it comes to his name, hacking is often mentioned and it’s about hacking that Shebang wanted to speak to him.

Soggie:Well. First I’d like to say that there is a difference between a ‘hacker’ and a ‘cracker’

Shebang:O.K.

For starters one should never call oneself a hacker. It’s not something one does. It’s a title given to you by others always. Originally the term ‘hacker’ was meant mostly to refer to people who would experiment wholeheartedly with a given technical subject. In the early seventies for example those people were absolutely no involved in any illegal activities whatsoever. An example of a cool hack might be to be fix up a coke-vending machine so that you could look up on the internet how many cokes are still in there. Maybe the owner of the vending machine might not agree with such an activity, but that’s the original spirit of hacking and hackers. And of course people who belong to that group don’t really like it if they are associated with criminals. And those people would criminal hackers ‘crackers’. They would themselves be called hackers and they are people who don’t want to get involved with the police because they’ve never done anything wrong.

Shebang: But what sort of things did you do. What kind of cool stuff did you do — was it all at the coke-vending machine level?

[PAUSE]

Shebang: You will be anonymous if you want.

Soggie:Well, I did contribute to a lot of software which is in fact a lot of crackers of yesteryear turned into... I know a lot of people who were into breaking into systems but merely because they wanted to get on the internet. Once that was possible without having to do any illegal stuff they quickly lost interest in doing so and you also have to consider that it is becoming more and more dangerous to do so. Ten years ago there was no legislation against computer crime. In Belgium there was one big case which was brought into public debate. It involved someone breaking into a national government’s computer network connecting all the ministers and the Prime Minister with their agendas and so forth. And they published the agenda of the Prime Minister in a national newspaper two days on end.

[LAUGHTER]

Soggie: So in the morning in the newspaper everybody in the country could read the Prime Minister’s agenda for each day and the Prime Minister was not that happy about that but in the end they could only charge the person who did that with the theft of electricity.

[LAUGHTER]

Soggie: And he stole about one Belgian franc of electricity and that was the only thing they could catch him on

[LAUGHTER] Of course there have been plenty of other break-ins. Criminal break-ins. To banks and so forth and they have lost some money, but that kind of thing was mainly done by bankemployees or ex bank employees and in that case they can sue the people for stealing money. But otherwise, just breaking into a system and not destroying anything... Until recently there was no legislation against that. Now of course all member states in the European Union have legislation just for breaking into a computer. Even if you don’t then destroy anything.

Shebang: Right. But weren’t you curious? Here you were twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old there must have been stuff that you really wanted to break into? Find out about? Anyone who had the know-how to break into systems, wouldn’t they want to check out Fort Knox or Nasa or the Russians, or Presidents.

Soggie: Well you also learn that you should not break into those systems.

Shebang: Really? Because they -?They’ll find you?

Soggie: They might

[LAUGHTER]

Shebang: So did you avoid them? Or did you just try and then stop?

Soggie: You avoid them.

Shebang: Really?

Soggie: Yes.

Shebang: You never tried?

Soggie: No, no, no.

Shebang: You never tried banks, or businesses, or the Belgian government. You never tried any of those things? You must have known people who did though. Didn’t you.

Soggie: Ja. There were people who did. And in most cases they got away with it.

Shebang: And what sort of things did they do?

Well try and poke around and see if they could [LITTLE LAUGH] get into the systems and occasionally they could. But if you can get into such a system you shouldn’t talk about it because then you draw attention upon yourself. And then they might find you. So those people in many case try to be as silent as possible about it if they can

[SLIGHT LAUGHTER] or if they’re stupid then they will boast about it. But those things like NASA were initially the prime targets. And they knew it themselves.

Shebang: What other prime targets were there?

Soggie: The original prime targets were high profile targets, NASA, the U.S. Military and so forth

[SLIGHT LAUGHTER]

Yes. But of course those are also going to be the sites they are going to focus on, to protect them.

Shebang: And have they ever asked you to help them? Because this whole thing of you being a ‘genius hacker’. Where did this all start. Was this someone’s dream.

Soggie: Some people like to exaggerate.

[SLIGHT LAUGHTER]