Max Vision lived in the shadowy world of cyberspace, that collection of networks and computers where fantasy becomes real and reality is whatever you want it to be.
Cyberspace is an abstraction, a way to speak about activity on the internet and other electronic places that don't really seem to exist anywhere in real space. One problem for cyberspace is securing information, possibly from the view of others, possibly just from attempts by others to change that information. Banks don't want people "drifting through" their databases changing the numbers in their bank accounts. While money is more than just numbers in databases, those databases are increasingly becoming the only record of that money. Similarly students "drifting through" university examination records could arbitrarily improve their marks.
Max Vision called himself a "white hat" hacker, someone who searches the internet for ways to break into computer systems, then reports those security holes so that security systems could be repaired and improved. To do this he needed excellent computing skills himself. Wired News described him as an "incredibly skilled hacker".
Max Vision was also an informant for the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, which named him "The Equalizer". He appears to have originally been a volunteer informant, consistent with his support for network security in general.
All this is in the past. Max Butler (Vision's real world name) is now serving an 18-month prison sentence, after he refused to spy on a friend. This intriguing story has become public in the past few months, through Butler's lawyer, and the writing of Security Focus journalist Kevin Poulsen.
Butler's mistake goes back to a computer security hole found in 1998. Despite widespread publicity, the US Department of Defense and other government sites didn't bother to repair the flaw in their systems. He modified a computer program that was designed to attack these sites in such a way that the program now fixed the fault, but added a means for him to continuing accessing the systems. He also had the program e-mail him to let him know this had been done, a change that made it very easy for him to be caught.
The FBI, which had previously been getting free advice from him, now used threat of jail to blackmail him into a more active role of spying on other hackers. The first target was the 1998 DefCon 6 conference, an annual conference of people interested in hacker issues, held in Las Vegas. (The FBI would like to describe hacking as an illegal activity. The original and still primary meaning of hacking is the ability to create clever software structures.) This year's DefCon conference was notable for the FBI arrest of Russian programmer Dmitri Sklyarov after he presented a paper on security weaknesses in the Adobe e-books software. Sklyarov is currently out on bail awaiting trial.
The blackmail continued until Butler refused to wear a bugging device to a meeting with a friend, Matthew Harrigan. He was then arrested and tried on the original charge, despite the assistance he had been providing to the FBI.
There is some debate over the FBI motives in turning on one of its own informers. Some commentators see it as a case of simple stupidity, which will discredit efforts to increase cyberspace security. (This raises the question of whether the FBI is interested in such security which protects privacy among other things, or is purely interested in monitoring the activity of everyone in cyberspace.)
A more cynical view is that it is a message to hackers: if we catch you and try to blackmail you into working for us, believe our threats. The FBI's plans to spy on and control cyberspace need such informers to beat the privacy programs written by hackers.
So who will win the battle of privacy? The best hackers can be expected to be smarter than anyone the FBI could recruit voluntarily. But the FBI plays dirtier.
BY GREG HARRIS (gregharris_greenleft@hotmail.com)