I remember very fondly my experience with the MIT Roof and Tunnel Hacker's club. I didn't attend MIT, but was there visiting a friend over a weekend that happened to be "Alumni Weekend"... so the Roof & Tunnel hackers were taking old Roof and Tunnel Hacker Alumni along the new routes... and I managed to get to tag along.

It was great to see the foyer under the great dome, looking down from the great dome, thru a spot in the fantastic lit stained glass ceiling where they'd removed one piece. I loved crossing a roof, very late at night, and I know the story behind "No Toad Sexing!" Though I didn't get to see any of the apparently few locations where Toad Sexing was authorized.

I was quite struck by the ... ethical system that the Roof & Tunnel hackers followed. They were careful to keep us civilians in line, and at one point we came close to a lab where there was vibration sensitive experiments going on. To keep the Hackers out that lab had installed super sophisticated alarms, and the hackers told us about a couple ways they thought they could defeat them... they also discussed the fact that putting those alarm systems in created a greater challenge than most locations, and thus was an attractive target to try and hack, and how that was a bit ironic... but they didn't hack them simply because anyone who cared enough about to do that was someone whose experiments they didn't want to disturb.

I remember running across roofs after midnight, going thru steam tunnels.

And later, I learned to pick locks myself, and back in Louisiana, at my High School, which was a statewide magnet school on a certain College Campus, we picked our way into old abandoned buildings and even found a steam tunnel. (Yes, I've probably just outed myself to a select group of people.)

Anyway, I wanted to take this time to publicly thank the Roof and Tunnel Hacker's club at MIT for a very nice night of criminal trespass. We left things the way we found them, and no property was destroyed, and a fun time was had by all.. and the patience thy showed to use "civilians" was greatly appreciated... even if, at the time, I was too awed and shy to properly thank them.

In the year since, I've trespassed on many a building, crossed many a roof, and enjoyed quite a few experiences. I've always respected the property I was trespassing on, and have adopted the ethics I saw displayed that night.

Plus, if nobody knows you were there, they're less likely to take steps that would make it harder for you to get back.

PS-- Just remembered one "crime" from those years. I was out on a date, bragging about how I'd learned to pick locks and my date said something indicating dubiousness... we were passing a FEDEX dropbox at the time and I said, hey, wait a minute... flipped the lid and found the FEDEX secure lock and.... managed to open it almost instantly. This was about %50 luck and %50 figuring that the fedex guy was working a route and the combo would be an easy to remember one, which made it a lot quicker to guess, and I got it on the third try. Opening the box and showing her all those Fedex Packages sure made an impression! (then I closed the box and we continued on....)

I think there's a lot of good lessons to be learned by young hackers in learning to pick locks, seeing the level of security that exists in practice, and the vulnerabilities. I hope the culture of this kind of hacking is still alive and well.