Apparently, being part of the
communist revolution gave him all sorts of ready-made
rationalisations. Membership has its advantages.
To Bowen, carding was little more than theft. Hacking may have been a
moral issue, but in early 1988 in Australia it was not yet much of a
legal one. Carding was by contrast both a moral and a legal issue.
Bowen recognised that some people viewed hacking as a type of
theft--stealing someone else's computer resources--but the argument
was ambiguous. What if no-one needed those resources at 2 a.m. on a
given night? It might be seen more as `borrowing' an under-used asset,
since the hacker had not permanently appropriated any property. Not so
for carding.
What made carding even less noble was that it required the technical
skill of a wind-up toy. Not only was it beneath most good hackers, it
attracted the wrong sort of people into the hacking scene. People who
had little or no respect for the early Australian underground's golden
rules of hacking: don't damage computer systems you break into
(including crashing them); don't change the information in those
systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share
information.
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