In 1998, The New Republic published a story about a hacker throwing a tantrum. 15-year-old Ian Restil, featured in a story called "Hack Heaven," was shouting at executives from a major software firm called Jukt Micronics.
"I want more money," said Restil. "I want a Miata. I want a trip to Disney World. I want X-Man comic [book] number one. I want a lifetime subscription to Playboy and throw in Penthouse. Show me the money! Show me the money!"
"It's pretty amazing that a 15-year-old could get a big-time software firm to grovel like that," marveled the writer, Stephen Glass.
It was indeed amazing—too amazing. Restil was a fabrication, as were elements of more than 40 other stories that Glass wrote for The New Republic and other publications. Glass himself had "hacked" the magazine's fact-checking process, fabricating notes, interviews, business cards, websites, and voicemails that would back up his outlandish stories.
"Hack Heaven" was Glass' final journalistic invention. It led to him being caught by journalists at Forbes, one of the first print publications to embrace Web-based journalism (it was then called Forbes Digital Tool).
Some of the Forbes writing is a sign of the time. "Our first step was to plug Jukt Micronics into a bunch of search engines," wrote Forbes journalist Adam Penenberg. "We found no website, odd for a 'big-time software firm.'"
Stephen Glass' efforts to create a second career for himself reached an end today, when the California Supreme Court ruled (PDF) that his "moral character" application was properly rejected. In a unanimous decision, the justices wrote:
Many of his efforts from the time of his exposure in 1998 until the 2010 hearing, however, seem to have been directed primarily at advancing his own well-being rather than returning something to the community. His evidence did not establish that he engaged in truly exemplary conduct over an extended period. We conclude that on this record he has not sustained his heavy burden of demonstrating rehabilitation and fitness for the practice of law...
[W]hat is at stake is not compassion for Glass... Given our duty to protect the public and maintain the integrity and high standards of the profession, our focus is on the applicant’s moral fitness to practice law.
It did not go unnoticed that some of Glass' fake journalism was published while he was an evening law student. The justices also noted that some of his fraudulent writings made fun of particular groups or played into stereotypes. In one article, he made up an African-American cab passenger whom he described as stealing the driver's wallet; in another, he described college-age Republicans tricking and humiliating women they met during a political convention that was supposedly awash in drugs and alcohol.
After he left journalism, Glass finished his education at Georgetown Law School, graduating in 2000. He passed the bar exam in both New York and California. Glass withdrew his application to the New York bar in 2004 after getting word that his application would not be accepted. In California, his application to become a lawyer was rejected in 2009; appeals followed, culminating in today's Supreme Court decision.
"Super-agent to super nerds"
The "Hack Heaven" story that finally resulted in Glass' ouster, still available online, details a list of fantastical happenings in the world of hackers, circa 1998. It's a remarkable story that one has to imagine would be caught almost instantly today. In the story, Restil breaks into the database of a fictional company called Jukt Micronics and posts every employee's salary along with pictures of nude women on the company's internal website, along with his calling card text: "the big bad bionic boy has been here baby."
The hack resulted not in punishment but in lucrative job offers.
"After weeks of trying futilely to figure out how Ian cracked the security program, Jukt's engineers gave up," wrote Glass. "That's when the company came to Ian's Bethesda, Maryland, home—to hire him."
It was part of a growing trend of hackers breaking the law in order to get big rewards, Glass explained. In fact, the practice had become so common that "hacker agents" were advertising their services in (also fictional) industry newsletters like Computer Insider.
Restil's agent supposedly represented close to 300 hackers—ages nine to 68. Companies were eager to strike deals with those who had hacked them, and that was giving law enforcers headaches, wrote Glass. The story continued:
Nevada law-enforcement officials got so desperate they ran the following radio advertisement: "Would you hire a shoplifter to watch the cash register? Please don't deal with hackers." The state took to the airwaves shortly after a hacker broke into a regional department store's computer system and instructed it to credit his Visa card about $500 per day. According to Nevada officials, the boy racked up more than $32,000 in credit before he was caught—but the store wouldn't press charges. It let him keep the money, then threw in a $1,500 shopping spree—all in exchange for showing them how to improve their security.
Little wonder, then, that 21 states are now considering versions of something called the Uniform Computer Security Act, which would effectively criminalize immunity deals between hackers and companies—while imposing stiff penalties on the corporations who make such deals. "This is just like prostitution," says Julie Farthwork of the anti-hacker Computer Security Center, which helped draft the legislation. "As a society, we don't want people making a career out of something that's simply immoral."
It was all fake. So too was the "National Assembly of Hackers," described as being created to lobby against the new law. The "organization" held a convention at which Restil was feted.
Glass' activities became the subject of a 2003 feature film called Shattered Glass.
In the years to follow, blogs and other online outlets grew to provide rapid and unforgiving fact-checks to journalists who missed the mark or dared to make up the facts. There have still been famous and successful journalistic liars, like Jayson Blair of The New York Times. But the Web has changed things. Sixteen years after Glass was caught, it's hard to imagine fabulism on Glass' level getting published more than once.
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