Chatty Hackers : Magazines: Harper’s draws computerphiles into spirited electronic debate on the ethics and dangers of breaking and entering data banks.

Don’t look now, but you may have company. In your office. In your home. A visitor may, at this moment, be prying into the most intimate details of your existence.

That intruder would be a computer hacker, and even if you don’t own or work at a computer, he can probably “access” the facts of your life as they exist in a multitude of government and corporate data banks.

By their nature, hackers tend to be hard to track down. So the editors of Harper’s Magazine invited a few of them to chat via a medium they can relate to--the computer bulletin board.

The forum was sufficiently intriguing that within three hours of launch, a Pentagon-funded anti-hacker group contacted Harper’s to scold the magazine and to request unedited transcripts of the electronic conversations that occurred, senior editor Jack Hitt said. The request was denied, he added.

Here’s how the forum worked: For 11 days, 20 well-known and underground computer wizards logged onto a Sausalito, Calif.-based computer bulletin board at their leisure. Guided by questions from Harper’s editors, they discussed the ethics, dangers and potential benefits of electronic breaking and entering, as well as the implications of this budding technology on issues of privacy and free speech.

One highlight in the discussion came when a former cattle rancher and Republican county chairman-turned-hacker and lyricist for the Grateful Dead offended a 17-year-old participant, known only as Phiber Optik, by comparing his rebelliousness to that of a skateboarder.

Optik responded, according to Harper’s, by quickly breaking into the computers at TRW and sharing with the other forum participants his antagonist’s complete credit history.

“Any fool knowing the proper syntax and the proper passwords can look up a credit history,” Optik said.

In fact, according to these master hackers, gaining access to anything from White House data banks to Joe Citizen’s electronic mail can be “a trivial undertaking.”

Many of these computerphiles argue--not always convincingly--that hacking is an honorable affair, a “moral obligation” even.

“Since World War II, we’ve been governed by a paramilitary bureaucracy that believes freedom is too precious to be entrusted to the people,” argues the aforementioned lyricist-hacker. “The government has become a set of Chinese boxes. Americans who believe in democracy have little choice but to shred the barricades of secrecy at every opportunity.”

Not everyone agrees. “The government is justified in taking extreme action to protect itself and the rest of us from you,” one programmer snaps, electronically.

In this forum, however, he was in the minority. As a hacker named Dave said, “I don’t want any congressional King Georges treading on my cursor. We must continue to have absolute freedom of electronic speech!”

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