When I was eight or nine, I had aspirations of being a hacker. I had just seen the movie WarGames, which gave the impression that hacking into top-secret government computers required little more than a computer, a phone line, and an idle afternoon. If Matthew Broderick could come this close to igniting global thermonuclear war, then surely I could cause some mischief with the Apple IIe in my parents’ basement. Maybe people would finally take me seriously if they learned that I was the one responsible for bringing down the entire Northeastern Wisconsin power grid.
My criminal ambitions were frustrated by the fact that my parents wouldn’t let me have a modem until several years later. But I always wondered what might have happened if I had gained notoriety as a hacker. Would my disability have softened any legal consequences that I might have faced? That strategy doesn’t seem to have worked out for Li’l Hacker, a teenaged phone phreaker who happens to be blind. The kid has made prank hostage calls to the police and has harassed hundreds of people across the country. He’s the target of an FBI investigation and may be prosecuted. Let this be a lesson to all of us gimps. We can get away with a lot, but we shouldn’t push our luck.
