Hacker

"You think you see me, but believe me, you don't," says the villain at the opening of BecauseHeCan. As the play at McCarter Theatre proceeds, he is proved correct, but for more than the reason playwright Arthur Kopit had in mind. The fellow speaking is a hacker who gets into the computer of an upscale New York couple and does great damage to their lives. He is telling us, in effect, that his presence in their machine is invisible and undetectable. But the remark also reflects how the audience feels about the hacker when the play is done.

PARIS - Interpol said yesterday that 25 suspected members of the loose-knit Anonymous hacker movement have been arrested in a sweep across Europe and South America. The international police agency said in a statement that the arrests in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain had been carried out by national law-enforcement officers working under the support of Interpol's Latin American Working Group of Experts on Information Technology Crime. Those arrested, from ages 17 and 40, are suspected of planning coordinated cyberattacks against institutions including Colombia's defense ministry and presidential websites, Chile's Endesa electricity company and national library, as well as other targets.

A high-school dropout admitted yesterday in federal court that he participated in the hijacking of Comcast's Internet home page in May 2008. Christopher Allen Lewis, 20, of Newark, Del., who pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to intentionally damage a protected computer system, was a member of the hacker group Kryogeniks. When Comcast's Internet customers tried to connect to their e-mails or voice mails on May 28-29, 2008, they were redirected to a page boasting of the attack.

Swordfish. The password used by Groucho for access to a speakeasy in that masterwork of 20th-century cinema Horse Feathers. And maybe the password used by hacker Hugh Jackman for computer access to Drug Enforcement Administration slush funds in this minibyte of 21st-century cyber-thrillers. In the new movie of that title, it is also the DEA code name for covert bank accounts angled for by a supremely fishy figure named Gabriel (John Travolta). Despite Jackman's abundant charisma and costar Halle Berry's abundant charms (bared, gratuitously, in a scene that everyone will talk about)

For a change, David beat Goliath. AT&T Corp. had sued in federal court to collect nearly $17,000 from a small Philadelphia law firm - even though the firm had been victimized by "hackers. " The bill was for long-distance toll calls made overseas, mostly to the Dominican Republic, over a nine-day period in August 1994. AT&T demanded payment, knowing that "hackers" had illegally accessed the firm's leased telephone system to make the overseas calls, and despite the firm's prompt notice that a scam was in progress.

Richard Stallman sluggishly emerges from his cramped and cluttered office- cubicle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is 11 a.m., and he is without shirt or shoes. His eyes are half-closed, his shoulder-length, scraggly brown hair is uncombed. A blanket and pillow lie on a couch inside the door. He greets a visitor with a yawn. Say good morning to one of the most brilliant computer programmers in America, an eccentric and obsessive 37-year-old who has dedicated his life to writing complex and useful software that he gives away for free, and who is challenging others to do the same.

Christopher A. Schanot, the 19-year-old St. Louis computer whiz who was arrested by the FBI last week in Broomall, was released to his parents yesterday and placed under house arrest - but only on condition that he not be allowed near a computer, or even talk about computers on the telephone. Schanot was also barred from contact with Netta Gilboa, the former Broomall woman with whom prosecutors believe he spent much of the last 10 months. Authorities say Gilboa, 37, helped Schanot run away from home after he became the anonymous source for a magazine article that Gilboa wrote about an ad-hoc, anti-big-business hacker group that called itself the Internet Liberation Front.

It is an electronic whodunit, pitting an Ivy League school against a student prodigy. The University of Pennsylvania has suspended a student for a year after he allegedly tried to get his math grade raised by masquerading - in an e-mail - as a teaching assistant. The student, Peter Kim, an 18-year-old who started college in California at age 15, contends that he never sent the e-mail in question. And Kim says he has evidence that a hacker, perhaps motivated by envy, racism or both, took control of his computer from another site, and sent the e-mail to frame him. Kim and the university agree on this much: E-mail, purportedly from one teaching assistant telling another one to raise Kim's grade, was sent from Kim's computer in May. Penn charged Kim with violating university codes of integrity and conduct.

There's a hacker out there who may have your number. Individual computer users should not feel invulnerable just because the cyberspace vandals seem inclined to attack only the big guys, say the experts. Everything that happened to the major e-commerce companies this week can happen to the little guy with his PC - and more, said Stephen Gorrell, program manager for Norton Internet Security 2000, a software product aimed controlling unwanted access to home and small business computers.

Since Andrew Hacker wrote Two Nations, a plain-spoken analysis of race relations in America, all these things have happened: He has been attacked in print by both black and white reviewers, conservatives and liberals. He has been interviewed by journalists from Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark, who anointed him the American armchair expert of choice since the Los Angeles riots. He has appeared on Donahue - and been stopped in the streets of New York by blacks who say that his devastating portrait of racism in America rings true.

When Naomi Stein, a Bala Cynwyd interior designer, was searching for a set of nightstands for her bedroom, she ran into a dilemma: She had a limited budget and rather expensive taste. Then she came across a blog post featuring an Ikea Rast dresser, a plain three-drawer box in unfinished pine, that had been painted, stained, and blinged out with hardware. She decided to follow the blogger's lead, creating her own elegant accent pieces from the same unassuming Ikea structure. "I figured, I can try it," Stein said.

CHRISTOPHER CHANEY, an unemployed Florida man, faces up to 60 years in prison after pleading guilty on Monday to hacking into the email accounts of such celebrities as Christina Aguilera, Mila Kunis and Scarlett Johansson, whose nude photos eventually landed on the Internet. It shows you how tough the job market is when you have the technical knowledge to hack into cellphones and still can't get a job. Chaney, 35, of Jacksonville, pleaded in federal court to nine counts, including unauthorized access to a computer and wiretapping.

PARIS - Interpol said yesterday that 25 suspected members of the loose-knit Anonymous hacker movement have been arrested in a sweep across Europe and South America. The international police agency said in a statement that the arrests in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Spain had been carried out by national law-enforcement officers working under the support of Interpol's Latin American Working Group of Experts on Information Technology Crime. Those arrested, from ages 17 and 40, are suspected of planning coordinated cyberattacks against institutions including Colombia's defense ministry and presidential websites, Chile's Endesa electricity company and national library, as well as other targets.

LONDON - They traded jokes, chuckled, and talked shop about a hacker plot called "Project Mayhem. " But at the heart of the conference call between the FBI and Scotland Yard was a strategy aimed at bringing down the hacking collective known as Anonymous, which has launched embarrassing attacks across the Internet. Unfortunately for the cyber sleuths, the hackers were listening, too - and now so is the rest of the world. Anonymous published the roughly 15-minute-long recording of the call to the Internet early Friday, gloating in a Twitter message that "the FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now. " The FBI said that the information "was intended for law enforcement officers only and was illegally obtained" but that no FBI systems were breached.

LONDON - The loose-knit hacking movement Anonymous claimed Sunday to have stolen thousands of credit card numbers and other personal information belonging to clients of the U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor. One hacker said the goal was to pilfer funds from individuals' accounts to give away as Christmas donations, and some victims confirmed unauthorized transactions linked to their credit cards. Anonymous boasted of stealing Stratfor's confidential client list, which includes entities such as Apple Inc., the Air Force, and the Miami Police Department, and mining it for more than 4,000 credit card numbers, passwords, and home addresses.

Join with me, fellow hackers, in an Occupy Magnolia Lane movement. It's time the 99 percent of golfers more likely to break a club than par demanded change. We want our own set of rules. And our own golf magazines. Let's face it, for those of us whose handicaps exceed the legal drinking age, the game's arcane rules and Byzantine instructions have as much relevance as the second law of thermodynamics. Last week, for example, golf officials finally got around to changing Rule 18-2b.

LONDON - Scotland Yard's cybercrime unit has arrested a teenager it suspects of working as the spokesman for the Lulz Security hacking collective, officials said yesterday. The Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit arrested a 19-year-old at an address in Scotland's remote Shetland Islands, the force said in a statement. His name wasn't released, but police said he was believed to be "Topiary," one of LulzSec's most prominent members. LulzSec burst onto the hacking scene several months ago with attacks on Fox News and the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service - which it defaced by posting a bogus story claiming that the late rapper Tupac Shakur had been discovered alive in New Zealand.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show (3 p.m., NBC10) - Jeff Bridges; The Script performs. Burn Notice (9 p.m., USA) - A hacker frames Barry's brother for a server heist. Rookie Blue (10 p.m., 6ABC) - A series of arsons culminates in the torching of a laundromat. Love Bites (10 p.m., NBC10) - Guys growing up is the theme of "Boys to Men. " Suits (10 p.m., USA) - When Harvey defends someone from Jessica's past, their relationship is put to the test. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart (11 p.m., COM)

By declaring that some cyber attacks could trigger a military response, the Pentagon may have taken a step that could further ensconce this nation in a seemingly perpetual state of war. That's not what war-weary Americans want to hear. After a decade of seeing thousands of U.S. soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan, people are looking for pathways to peace, not new avenues to combat. The Defense Department's new position, first revealed Tuesday in a Wall Street Journal article, says military retaliation would be appropriate if computer hackers caused or threatened the same death or destruction that would occur in a military attack.

No security in cyber world. Major hacking stories in the personal, political, and industrial worlds have shown recently how widespread cyber attacks - from the silly to the vicious - really are. "They're happening every nanosecond - that's how you have to think," says Ray O'Hara, 2011 president of ASIS International, a security organization. "You just can't go to sleep at night, thinking you're secure. " Consider: In April, hackers attacked Sony's PlayStation Network online, getting into 100 million customer accounts.