Computer geek: A villain to Hollywood, a hero to hackers

Computer geek: A villain to Hollywood, a hero to hackers

By Doug Mellgren

STEINSHOLT, Norway (AP): In the basement of an old farmhouse
deep in the Norwegian countryside, a 15-year-old computer geek
named Jon Lech Johansen pecked out the finishing touches on a
piece of programming that had been keeping him busy after school
and homework.

Jon says he didn't realize it at the time, but when he pressed
'enter' on his keyboard 16 months ago and launched his handiwork
into cyberspace, he was setting off an intercontinental
earthquake.

The program he assembled over a few weeks on his home-
assembled Pentium 600 computer would rattle Hollywood, unleash
lawsuits, mobilize demonstrators in his defense and have him
hauled in for a night of questioning by Norwegian police.
At 57 kilobytes, the tiny program is no more than the computer
equivalent of a heartbeat.

But what it does is frightening to anyone with a financial
stake in the entertainment industry:

It enables you to copy movies off a DVD disc onto your
computer, obviating the need to buy a DVD player. It also means
you can send the movies onto the Internet. As bandwidth increases
it will become easier and faster to download these movies. And
then the question will be, why pay US$3.99 to rent Hollywood's
latest blockbuster when you can see it for free without leaving
your home? And why buy a DVD player if your home PC can do the
job?

To the Motion Picture Association of America, which represents
the major Hollywood studios, putting the program on the Internet
for anyone to download was "akin to a tool that breaks the lock
on your house."

Future historians may one day look back on it as a defining
moment, when the boundless freedoms inherent in the Internet
collided head-on with a multibillion-dollar entertainment
industry wrapped up in its own technological revolution.

Jon doesn't go in much for philosophizing. He's 17 now, a
down-to-earth mailman's son in wire-rimmed spectacles, peach-fuzz
on his upper lip struggling to be a mustache, a sprinkle of acne
on his cheek. He finds his fame in the worldwide hacker
fraternity "a little tiresome." The headlines calling him
Norway's Teen Data Genius make him laugh.
"Genius?" snorts Jon. "I know at least 10 people who could have
done the same thing under the same circumstances."

Which is what makes his little computer program so scary to
Hollywood.

He knew that the program could get him into trouble, and for a
while after launching it in late October, 1999, he would remove
the hard drive from his computer each night and hide it in case
the law showed up. But when weeks went by with no reaction, he
stopped doing that.

But his program had been noticed, especially in an office
block 5,300 miles (8,500 kilometers) away in Encino, California,
where a team of computer whizzes patrols the Internet on behalf
of the Motion Picture Association of America, searching for
copyright violations.

In Internet chat rooms, there was excited talk among hackers
about a discovery called DeCSS. CSS stands for Content Scrambling
System, meaning the code that protects DVDs. Someone had found a
way to "de-CSS" the discs, meaning the movies they contain could
be played on an ordinary computer instead of on a special DVD
player, and could be copied over and over to infinity.

In the drab Ventura Boulevard office, brightened by the
classic poster of Marilyn Monroe in billowing white skirt, the
MPAA's team tested DeCSS by copying the movie You've Got Mail
from a DVD. It worked.

DVDs - Digital Versatile Discs - look like compact discs and
their sales have soared- 64 million in 1999 in the United States
alone. Unlike videotapes, copied DVDs don't lose quality, and
Hollywood envisioned millions of dollars in royalties
disappearing if its movies suddenly became available for free on
the Internet.

The code was easy to break, experts say, partly because the
United States long banned exports of more advanced encryption
technology, lest it fall into hostile hands. For the MPAA, whose
members include Disney, Sony, MGM, Paramount, Universal, Warner
and Twentieth Century Fox, the ban left a big hole in the
copyright armor.

A hacker network that calls itself MoRE - Masters of Reverse
Engineering - obtained parts of the CSS code and worked out the
rest. Jon is a member of MoRE. He says he got the codes from a
German and a Dutchman.

The Norwegian youth took the next step, writing a program that
incorporated the codes and would allow users to copy movies.

Jon was 15, had no money and nothing to lose. So he identified
himself when posting the program. And the other two hackers?

"They didn't dare go public, probably because they had jobs
and things," he surmises. "I don't know who they are. It is
probably better that I don't."

Three months later, when the knock finally came on the door of
the farmhouse, it was the evening of Monday, Jan. 24, 2000. The
visitors were officers of the Norwegian National Authority for
Investigation and Prosecution of Economic and Environmental
crime.

"I was very surprised they came so late," says Jon. "If I had
wanted to, three months would have been plenty of time to destroy
the evidence."

The police took the youngster, his computers and mobile phone
to the local police station and questioned him, he says, for six
or seven hours.

Inger Marie Sunde of the economic crime unit in Oslo said the
force acted on an MPAA complaint, and that no decision has been
made on whether to press charges.

Jon's father, Per, the local mailman, is a veteran Internet
surfer and owns the Web site where his son posted the code. So he
too was interrogated, but at home, because he was sick.

Per Johansen managed to phone the Norwegian media, and before
the police finished asking questions, reporters were at the door.
A burly, amiable man with a scrub of whiskers, he says he had no
idea what his son had been up to.

Jon insists he wrote the program only to be able to watch DVDs
on his own computer, using the Linux operating system, and not
with the intent of copying and spreading the movies.

Mark Litvack, of the MPAA in Hollywood, says word in the chat
rooms was different.

"It was people talking about it on the Internet saying, 'Look,
there's a way to make a copy of a DVD on your hard drive.' It
wasn't a group of Linux users saying 'We can play the DVD on our
computers."'

After the interrogation, Jon posted an angry note on the
Internet. He had just gotten home at 2 a.m., he wrote. "I haven't
eaten, and someone's definitely going to pay for this." He got
500 e-mails that night, and the spread of DeCSS through the
Internet picked up pace.

"I think he knew something might happen, but I don't think he
reckoned that there would be as much trouble as there was," says
his father.

The family was getting up to 100 phone calls day, plus
thousands of e-mails and swarms of reporters.

"It got to be a bit too much," says Jon's mother, Maria.
Jon's classmates and teachers at the Thor Heyerdahl Secondary
School were flabbergasted.

"He had told me he was working on something, but I hadn't
expected to read about it on the front pages," says Thomas Aaler,
a classmate.

Fame didn't change Jon, said his Norwegian-language teacher,
Erik Gjestvang. "He was the same nice, open, trusting boy."
Jon is described as quiet, friendly, a brilliant student, fluent
in Norwegian, French, English and Polish. His mother was born in
Poland and his middle name, Lech, honors the Polish anticommunist
hero Lech Walesa.

Living in an isolated house, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from
Oslo and an hour's bus ride from school, Jon is used to working
alone. That, says a teacher, Jan Gangaard, may explain why the
boy turned to the Internet for companionship.

Jon and his father laugh at that idea. "I would have been
programming anywhere," says Jon.

"By the time he was 7, I had to buy him a computer because
mine was always occupied," his father says. Dressed in his
mailman's uniform, he stands chatting in a yard filled with
building materials for restoring the old farmhouse.

"An endless project," sighs Maria Johansen.

In the basement stand several computer monitors. A bulletin
board holds hacker conference tags identifying Jon as a speaker.
A national academic prize he won last year is on the wall.

Some hackers have held demonstrations in the United States on
his behalf, waving giant pictures of him, claiming his freedom of
speech is under attack.

"He gets a lot of respect for hacking skills. He's willing to
come forward publicly and take whatever responsibility, good or
bad," said Robin Gross, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a nonprofit group backing defendants in New York and
California DeCSS court cases.

"It's really a matter of principle for this young man," he
said in a telephone interview from California.

"They (the MPAA) made it clear he is one of the targets here,"
said Gross. "They pick on a little guy and it only brings more
support for his cause."

The MPAA rejects the bullying image. On its Web site it says
that "In some areas of the world, video pirates have driven
legitimate video merchants out of business." DeCSS, it says,
hands "the keys to the castle" to copyright pirates, hurting the
livelihood of thousands of people, from big-name stars to grips,
gaffers and carpenters.

On Per Johansen's road-weary Toyota van are stickers in
English saying "geek" and FREE JON JOHANSEN, even though Jon was
not jailed, and is unlikely to be. The complexities of trying a
Norwegian juvenile on charges originating in California would be
huge.

The MPAA has sued others, mainly New York-based 2600: The
Hacker Quarterly and its publisher Eric Corley, for promoting
DeCSS online. Jon testified at that trial but was not named in
the suit.

In August, a district court in New York ruled for the film
industry, saying posting DeCSS "is analogous to the publication
of a bank vault combination in a national newspaper."

It ordered the program removed from the Internet.

Easier said than done. DeCSS can still be found on hundreds of
Web sites. And the legal battle rages on.

Backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2600 magazine
appealed the ruling in January. It says the computer code is a
language, protected as free expression. It also argues that the
DVD players prevent owners from being able to take full advantage
of the DVDs they purchase, such as fast-forwarding past
commercials, or making copies, all of which can be done on
computers.

Meanwhile, Jon is named as a defendant in a California civil
case, in which the MPAA claims the DeCSS program violates trade
secrecy laws. It is expected to go to trial soon.

Jon says he's not worried, and when asked if he would do it
all again, he replies unhesitatingly: "Yes, clearly."

His notoriety won him job offers from computer companies, and
he quit school to work for a Norwegian software developer, but
has since moved on to a new job whose details can't be revealed,
his father says.

Per Johansen still jokes about the fuss, wondering out loud:
"Maybe Hollywood wants to buy the rights to his story?"

On the Net:
http://www.eff.com
http://www.2600.com
http://www.mpaa.org