Hackers: We're the good guys

PITTSBURGH - The way Louis Trumpbour sees it, most computer hackers aren't criminals, they're more like cowboys: frontiersmen most at home on the range known as cyberspace.

The 29-year-old tavern owner from Berlin, Germany, is leading SummerCon, a gathering of roughly 200 hackers in Pittsburgh that began Friday and runs through today.

The event has been held every year but one since 1985. This year organizers hope to convince the public - and federal regulators - that there are "black hats" and "white hats" in Hackerville.

"Black hats are the people that do the bad stuff," said Mark Trumpbour, Louis' brother, who helped organize the convention. "White hats either use their knowledge to thwart the black hats or use it for good."

Hackers are not always people who use computers to commit crimes or mischief, said FBI Agent Tom Grasso, a computer expert in the Pittsburgh FBI office and the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance, an anticybercrime group that includes law enforcement agencies, academics and computer industry officials.

Some break computer codes to find "shortcuts" to use a program more efficiently, for example.

Louis Trumpbour says he once hacked into a university's student e-mail system, then sent e-mail to thousands of students telling them of the security problem with their system. He argues that such acts provide a service by revealing security problems with software, which is then improved.

"Let's say an individual understands a city so well that they know the best way to go from Point A to Point B during rush hour, even if that means you may have to go the wrong way down the one way streets," Louis Trumpbour said. "Does that mean it is dangerous? Maybe. But should you go to jail or be a felon or whatever for doing it? I don't think so."

But that's where Grasso, and law enforcement agents like him, sometimes step in.

"Certainly the FBI doesn't prosecute anyone for going the wrong way down the one-way street," said Grasso, adopting Trumpbour's metaphor. "But when you cause thousands of dollars of damage by knocking a company's system off-line, that's different."

Last year, the Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University, a taxpayer-funded group that responds to Internet-based attacks, tallied 82,094 "incidents" last year. An incident could be a problem affecting one machine or it could be like the "I Love You" e-mail virus that affected millions of computers and cost billions of dollars.

Louis Trumpbour agrees that hacking for destructive purposes is wrong.

"People who deface Web pages or destroy systems or cripple systems like eBay and Amazon, I wouldn't really call those people hackers. I'd call them vandals," he said.

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