Our goal is to preserve this short period of computerist activity in its documentary form for the benefit of students, scholars, and other computerists. Witch hunts are about images and social control.
Symbols are simply things that stand for, or indicate, something else.
Words and names are examples of symbols that, when cleverly used, can created images of various kinds. For the computer underground, these images have been grossly distorted. Successful denunciations redefine the relationship between events or behaviors and their context through manipulation of symbols that provides new, derogatory meanings and creates moral distance between the perpetrator and the denouncer. To save space, we have omitted the bibliography from which the following come, but it is available upon request. While it is true telephone abuses may incur heavy costs, such dramatization illustrates the sensationalism of media depictions.