I wish I were a hacker

I believe regretting things in your life is as useless as having George W. Bush as your "phone a friend" lifeline. But I do regret one thing from my childhood -- never becoming a computer hacker.\nI had my chances. My dad tried to get me into computers at an early age. He gave me a Vic-20 when I was 12 years old. Dear old dad told me if I learned to program with it, I would be rich one day. Alas, I chose to play video games instead, and now I'm nothing more than a lowly wordsmith who can beat anyone on this planet at Madden 2001. It's all about priorities.\nBut I do regret it and not only because of the money. I regret it because I smile whenever I read about some teenager scamming the stuffed shirts on Wall Street out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I grin when some 13-year-old breaks into the Microsoft site and puts a Hitler mustache on Bill Gates (they haven't done that one yet, but they should). I laugh out loud when corporations lose thousands of dollars because middle-management types want to look at pictures of 19-year-old tennis players and unleash viruses on their systems.\nI love hackers, not because they're teenagers who outsmart old rich men, but because they are fighting a system that our government and its corporate sponsors are using to destroy our privacy.\nTake this Carnivore e-mail surveillance system for example. If implemented, it will allow the FBI to read any e-mail it wants. Renamed a less ominous DCS100, this system is like leaving the cops a key to your house so they can rummage through your mail whenever they like, and you don't even get to know about it.\nBefore anyone tells me that I'm being paranoid and it would only be used against criminals, the Wall Street Journal reported Dec. 7 that FBI lawyers are deliberating about whether Carnivore can legally capture e-mail addresses under a 1986 law that allowed police to record phone numbers of people peripherally related to a crime investigation. In other words, if you happen to be on the same one of these gargantuan e-mail lists as a criminal, the FBI may be able to intercept your e-mail, too.\nHow does this relate to my privacy? If I want to send a picture of a spread-eagle, nude woman over 18 to a friend (not that I would look at anything so sick and depraved), I should be able to do so without some federal agent bemoaning the moral decay of American society.\nThe government's propensity to want to track every little potential for crime with computers is also destroying the American dream of being able to start all over. A rehabilitated ex-criminal who has served his or her debt to society can never escape the past when it's only a few keystrokes away. \nI know we aren't supposed to forgive criminals or believe that they can actually change, but we sometimes forget that these people helped shape our country. How many of our ancestors sailed to the New World to escape their past? Does anyone remember that Georgia was a penal colony? How many of the pioneers that helped to shape the West were trying to escape their past? Now if I get a parking ticket in Alaska, the Indiana DMV is suspending my license.\nAnd now corporate America, which wants to reduce us to an age bracket and a credit rating, uses the same means to track us. \nThe last time I went in for a haircut, for example, the manager complained to me how the main office kept calling her. Every time one of the employees took a break, he or she had to enter the time in the computer. Every time a piece of haircutting equipment wore out, they had to enter it into the computer. The manager told me that if the employees were not taking their scheduled breaks, the office would call her. She also told me that the office was complaining about the number of sideburn trimmers they went through. \nWhat this all means to me is some poor schmuck has to hear his boss come in and tell him that he has to call up store number 1337 because they are using too many sideburn trimmers, and it is messing up the numbers. (This is what you business school people get to look forward to. If you work really, really hard, you even might get to be the boss discussing sideburn trimmers with schmucks!)\nSemi drivers have to put up with computer tracking, too. They have these little black boxes in the cabs with them, which relate their speed, location and last bowel movement to their company.\nPretty soon, we'll have computers and cameras tracking every move we make in the workplace. After all, you're working on their property and taking their money. What right do you have to privacy? \nI've run out of space and can't talk about Kroger cards and credit ratings. So I'll end by saying I just regret I can't blow up the system figuratively -- to break in there and delete my credit rating, to be able to erase my past and start anew if I ever do anything stupid, to be a hacker.