***************************************************************************
********************* Wired InfoBot Copyright Notice **********************
***************************************************************************
************ All material retrieved from the Wired InfoBot is *************
***************** Copyright 1993 Wired, Rights Reserved. ******************
***************************************************************************
  Requesting information from the Wired InfoBot (other than the help file)
  indicates your acceptance of the following terms and conditions:        

  (1) These articles and the contents thereof may be reposted, remailed,
      or redistributed to any publicly accessible electronic forum provi-
      ded that this notice remains attached and intact.                  

  (2) These articles may not under any circumstances be resold or redis-
      tributed for compensation without prior written agreement of Wired.

  (3) Wired keeps an archive of all electronic address of those requesting
      information from the Wired InfoBot. An electronic mailing list will
      be compiled from this archive.  This list may from time to time be
      used by the staff of Wired Online Services for the purpose of dis-
      tributing information deemed relevant to Wired's online readers.

      If you wish to have your name removed from this mailing list,
      please notify us by sending an electronic mail message to
      infoman@wired.com.


  If you have any questions about these terms, or would like information
  about licensing materials from Wired, please contact us via telephone
  (+1.415.904.0660), fax (+1.415.904.0669), or email (info@wired.com).
***************************************************************************
**************************** G*E*T**W*I*R*E*D*! ***************************


1_Wired 1.3_
Hacking the Material World
**************************

-- by Michael Scott


Tunnellers are hacking the subterranean passages and hidden crawl spaces 
of colleges and universities across America - in a kind of urban 
spelunking that pits the true hacker's spirit of exploration against an 
unmapped and frequently risky landscape.

Ask around in the right circles and you start hearing the stories. At 
Columbia University, forgotten corridors wind through the basement maze 
of a 19th-century insane asylum and past abandoned bomb shelters. At the 
University of Minnesota, an old network of hydro-electric tunnels 
connects with the university's own steam tunnel system. At MIT, freshmen 
meet in the dead of night to take something they call an Orange Tour, up 
hill and down dale along the school's domed roofs and into its 
labyrinthine sub-basements.

Across America, people are hacking their way through the underground 
passages and hidden crawl spaces of colleges and universities  - a kind 
of urban spelunking that pits the true hacker's spirit of exploration 
against an unmapped and frequently risky landscape.

"Basically what you do is pick a building and go down to the lowest sub-
basement and just start looking," says Patrick McCabe, who studied 
economics at Columbia in the mid-1980s. He found a way into the tunnels 
there after reading about the role they played in various student riots 
and sit-ins in the 1960s. "Usually you find a door that is locked, and 
you feel air coming through. And if you keep going back regularly 
enough, eventually you'll find the door unlocked because someone has 
been using the tunnels for maintenance."

The tunnels at Columbia skirt the entire perimeter of the uptown 
Manhattan campus, a surface distance of about three quarters of a mile. 
In his years of exploring, McCabe found graffiti and crates of supplies 
left over from the days when parts of the tunnels were set up as bomb 
shelters. Beneath Columbia's Maison Francaise, arched brick storm-drains 
>from the last century lead into what was once an insane asylum. Tunnels 
into the sub-basement of the main library cross a midden of water-
damaged books and folios.

"You saw lots of things that had been chucked out over the years," 
McCabe says. "It wasn't so much the physical geography as the history 
apparent there that really intrigued me."

McCabe's younger brother David and his buddy Norman Choe are active 
tunnelers at the University of Chicago, where they use an old 
archaelogist's trick to spot new spur lines. On snowy days, the warmth 
>from the steam tunnels is enough to melt a telltale pathway on the 
surface above.

"We heard about the tunnels from friends who heard about them from other 
friends; it's pretty secretive," says Choe, a fourth-year biology major. 
"We've determined that tunnels go underneath just about the whole campus 
- maybe a mile altogether."

Chicago's tunnels range from cramped 4-by-4-foot shafts to room-size 
spaces full of boilers and steam-pressure equipment.

"The pumps scare the living daylights out of you when they turn on 
suddenly," Choe says. "We try to go down with at least two people; three 
is optimum. On nights when you're going out steam tunneling you get your 
flashlight and water bottles and vice grips and drive over to campus. 
You meet up, select a grate; sometimes you have to wait for security 
patrols to pass. It's like a military operation."

A single query posted on Usenet brought responses from tunnel hackers 
all over North America: at Reed College in Oregon, the California 
Institute of Technology, Rice University in Houston, State University of 
New York at Stony Brook, the University of British Columbia, the 
University of Wisconsin, and the University of Cincinnati.

At MIT, where tunnelling and its attendant pranks are known simply as 
"hacking," unauthorized treks across the university's roofs are so 
common, the school has instituted a standard fine - $50 for most roofs, 
and $500 if you're unlucky enough to get caught on top of the Green 
Building, the tallest building on campus.

The tradition is well established at MIT, encouraged for years by the 
now-legendary Technology Hackers Association. Brian Bentz, the physicist 
and computer scientist who founded the group of high-tech pranksters in 
1980, says the pastime ebbs and flows depending on student interests. In 
any given year there are probably 20 or 30 active tunnel hackers, with 
their activities falling into three broad categories: below-ground 
tunnelling, building interiors, and rooftops. Bentz calculates that at 
least half of MIT's hacking is done on the college's interconnected 
roofs.

David M., a third-year MIT grad student in electrical engineering, has 
been hacking MIT for seven years. He estimates that 70 or 80 percent of 
the school's undergrads at one time or another go on the organized 
Orange Tours to visit a number of MIT's more famous hacks.

"Those of us who've been doing it for a while take on undergrads as 
apprentices," says Equinox, who describes his hacks as urban rock 
climbing. "There are genuine risks. We explain about not putting your 
hand into machinery, in case it suddenly starts up. The nuclear power 
plant is somewhere you just never go. So is the medical building because 
of the animals there for AIDS research."

"There's a lot of interesting architecture at MIT," says Bentz. "And if 
you think about it in 3-D, you start to see parts of buildings that 
aren't apparent. That's where the shafts are, and the opportunities."


-------------------------------------
Michael Scott (mscott@mindlink.bc.ca) is a Vancouver-based writer and 
broadcaster whose weekly column appears in newspapers across Canada. For 
the last six years he has been a staff reporter at The Vancouver Sun.



(c) 1993 Wired magazine


