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I MISS CRIME

identified a G-man in the crowd could point him out, make a case, and, if the audience concurred, take home a coveted I SPOTTED THE FED AT DEF CON T-shirt. Often the suspected fed would just give up and good-naturedly whip out a badge, giving the hacker an easy win.

Max's mission was broad. Trahon and Beeson wanted him to chum up to his fellow hackers and try to get their real names, then lure them into exchanging public PGP encryption keys, which security-minded geeks use like sealing wax to encrypt and sign their e-mail. Max's heart just wasn't in it. Writing reports for the bureau was one thing, and he'd had no qualms about getting the goods on the DarkCYDE phreaks, who were too young to get in real trouble. But this assignment smelled like snitching. Personal loyalty was written deep into Max's firmware, and one look at the Def Con crowd told him these were his people.

Many of the hackers were reluctantly giving up childish things, migrating into legitimate dot-com jobs or starting security companies. They were becoming white hats, like Max. A popular T-shirt at the conference summed up the mood: I MISS CRIME.

Max shrugged off the FBI's edict and began attending the parties and the talks. On the roster this year was a much-anticipated software release by the Cult of the Dead Cow. The cDc were the rock stars of the hacker world—literally: They recorded and performed music and infused their conference presentations with over-the-top theatrics that made them media darlings. At this Def Con the group was unleashing Back Orifice, a sophisticated remote-control program for Windows machines. If you could trick someone into running Back Orifice, you could access their files, see what was on their screen, and even look through their webcam. It was designed to embarrass Microsoft for the shoddy security in Windows 98.

The crowd at the Back Orifice presentation was ecstatic, and Max found the energy infectious. But of more pragmatic interest to Max was a talk on the legalities of computer hacking by a San Francisco criminal defense attorney named Jennifer Granick. Granick opened her presenta-