Shebang: So you’re not really a hacker at all! You’re here under false pretences! And we had such high hopes that you would tell us all about the secret world of the hacker...Are you really being genuine here. You really don’t do that kind of thing? You’ve never done it?

Soggie: Well, I don’t do any illegal activities

[LAUGHTER]

As I said in the beginning there is a difference between a hacker and a cracker. And most people that I knew who were into breaking into systems are now mostly into the open source community or the free source community, which is a movement in the internet building software which is freely re-distributable and modifiable. And they will create a pool of intellectual property which cannot be locked any more, because if you can redistribute and modify it, and redistribute modified versions, that you must also do that under the same copyright as it originally had. So you can’ t take that piece of software and modify it a bit and charge money and prevent others from distributing it again. And many or most of the people I knew from then are now active in that movement and they are writing software. That’s in most cases not illegal.

Shebang: If you put your mind to it, could you find out what every one of your colleagues are doing? Could you find out what banks are doing? If you put your mind to it, is there anything that is actually barred to you? I’m not saying have you done it because that would be incriminating. If you wanted to know what Shebang was up to in a day you could check up on us, too couldn’t you?

Soggie: No.

Shebang: You couldn’t?

Soggie: No.

Shebang: You’d know what Internet sites I personally had visited. You’d be able to check out what kind of things I had done. Could you not check on what I was up to?

Soggie: Yes, in many cases, but I would never be able to find out everything. Or it might work in many cases. Because in many cases you can just get that information from public sources. If you have ever been to the U.S., for a small fee you can get someone’s credit status, you can look up in phone books and so forth. But don’t think there are people who could even break into any given computer. It’s not like you give an address or phone number and then people will guarantee that they will break into the system. Most people who try to break into systems have a choice of about 100. And they try 100 and out of those 100 they can maybe get into three. But it’s not as if they can take one and be able to break into that one system, because if the system is properly administered and properly managed with a competent system administrator it become virtually impossible to break into the system. So if the information that you want to retrieve is on one of such systems then you are out of luck and then you have to find another way. But in many cases being creative with other ways is part of the challenge...

[LAUGHTER]

Shebang: How much a day do you spend on a computer?

Soggie: Fourteen hours or something.

Shebang: Fourteen hours. So what else do you do?

Soggie: Well mostly I am working. And if I use computers in my spare time it’s mostly using them on the network. When I started with computers I was happy with just a computer but now a computer without an internet connection doesn’t appeal to me any more. It needs to have a network connection before it becomes interesting to me. And most of the time I just read stuff that I find on the web.

Shebang: I am still absolutely baffled. Here you were, you first started with all this when you were extremely young, and I know how curious and indeed how brilliant you are. Forgive me for coming back to this but how did the idea come about that you are a genius hacker...? Come on. where does this come from. You’ve allowed us to make THAT public, after all. So...?

Soggie: Well it is to do with the other meaning of the word hacker. I didn’t do a lot of the illicit parts of it

Shebang: Really? Weren’t interested, what -?

Soggie: Ten years ago or so the people who were interested in hacking and cracking and related activities they were mostly interested in learning about the systems, because even if you want to do something illegal with it you first have to read a lot and study a lot. You also have a class of people in those communities who are ripping off others. One publishes a phone number and password and user ID and it’s not a very big deal to break into the system by calling that and then having some underground magazine and just copying that user ID and password, that’s no problem.