Wall Street Journal Misidentifies "First Hacker"

WASHINGTON - March 17, 2024 - PRLog -- In an article Saturday entitled How Much Do You Know About the History of Hacking? (https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/cyber-security-history-quiz-772216f0?mod=tech_feat1_cybersecurity_p), the Wall Street Journal claims that hacking did not begin until the 1970s.

More specifically it asks "who is considered the first hacker?," and then provides the following answer:  John Draper in 1970.

But hacking, especially using telephone systems to make free long-distance calls, was being conducted on a regular basis in the late 1950s and early 1960s, says John Banzhaf, an MIT student at the time, and now a professor at the George Washington University.

To demonstrate this he cites a page (http://banzhaf.net/by/VOODOOPhoneHacking.pdf) from a June 1957 MIT magazine which provides a graphical illustration and explanation about how it was widely known that students were hacking into the telephone links from MIT to many government installations to make unauthorized long-distance calls to girlfriends as well as to many government officials.

Banzhaf says he never personally heard of anyone telephoning the president, but he knew about and participated in making unauthorized calls from and through MIT's telephone system via links to Lincoln Laboratory, the Pentagon, the DEW line in Alaska, and many foreign installations to telephones in the U.S.; all before he graduated in 1962.

Writing about several recent studies which explain how research he performed in 1958 helped popularize the term "FOO" among computer programmers. the professor wrote (http://banzhaf.net/by/BanzhafsFirstLawArticle.html):

"Students at MIT were hacking even in the 1950s, long before modern solid-state computers, PCs, the Internet, etc.  At that time MIT students hacked into the world-wide telephone and data transmission systems used by various branches of the Defense Department into which they obtained unauthorized access from phones in labs at MIT doing research and providing support for those military facilities.  Indeed, it was not uncommon for a tech savvy student at MIT to phone his girl friend at Wellesley by way of a very very long distance but free call routed through Alaska, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and then the Panama Canal."

In 1964, Banzhaf went on to prove that it was possible to provide legal protection for computer programs by copyrighting them (http://banzhaf.net/about/NYTimesProgramCopyrighted.pdf). Subsequently, he developed what is now known as "The Banzhaf Index" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzhaf_power_index) which used computer analysis to measure voting power in complex voting systems.

http://banzhaf.net/  jbanzhaf3ATgmail.com  @profbanzhaf