If you do that in the world of computers it's called access to information and self-guided education, but if you try it in law or medicine or civil engineering you are best described as a "charlatan." The Information Age may be the golden age of charlatanry.
This is the way that system-cracking hackers act, the way that hackers learn things. When system cracker people use convincing language to get people to give them access that they really shouldn't have, they call that practice "social engineering." It's very powerful and very corrosive.
Hackers are very evangelical about liberating other people's secrets. It's a core myth of the era. There have been several Hollywood movies that hinge on gallant Robin Hood hackers breaking into a system and finding out some terrible and important secret. The baddies try to grab them and shut them up, but in the last reel the hackers always blow the hidden information all over the network and it ends up in the New York Times or CNN. End of story.
It's a beautiful idea really, one of the central romantic myths of the Information Age. No one can shut up the heroic hacker dissidents, and the bad guys always crumble and scamper off like whipped dogs when the truth comes out. A beautiful myth. I've been following the hack-phreak scene for years now, hoping that someday, just once, something like that would actually happen. Some hacker kid breaks into the sinister corporate mainframe and he finds and distributes the secret and hideous data files that prove that rich guys in suits are deliberately poisoning us with dioxin. Or maybe they've got the aliens from the Roswell incident or just a few of the 47 guys who shot John Kennedy. If a hacker really did something like that would make up for a lot of annoyances.
Never happens. Never ever. Actually, horrible secrets come up all the time, but they're usually found out by journalists and cops. And even that finishes up with a happy ending about one time in twenty. Does the free flow of information on the Internet help? I wonder. I do know of one revelatory scandal that broke on the Internet, the Pentium chip bug. I don't think I've ever seen an example of people on the Internet unearthing and distributing a real-world non-computer- based scandal.
Something really embarrassing. The truth comes in over the modems and governments fall. Maybe that'll happen someday. I don't think it's happening now.
Let me give you what seems to me to be a swell real-world example of this. I think this story is the single weirdest story I've ever heard over the Internet.
This story has been happening in the country of Slovakia over the past year. Slovakia used to be the right half of Czechoslovakia, but the Czech Republic ended up in the hands of Vaclav Havel, and the Slovak Republic ended up in the pockets of a gentleman named Vladimir Meciar. Meciar became Prime Minister of his new little republic, but he got into a nasty power-struggle with Slovakia's President, a guy named Michal Kovac. Kovac and Meciar were from different parties and they just didn't get along.
Well, President Michal Kovac has a son named Michal Kovac Jr, and this younger man was involved in some shady business deals in Austria. Meciar knew this, he was making a big deal of it. Nothing much was happening there though, his son's financial scandal wasn't destroying Kovac politically.
So last August eight guys jump Michal Kovac Jr in his Mercedes limo. First they handcuff him, then they put a black hood on him, then they beat him up, then they torture him with electric shocks, then they force him to guzzle half a liter of whiskey so he gets completely plastered. Then they bundle the president's son into his own Mercedes limo, and they drive him across the border into Austria. Then they dump him and leave.
So the Austrian cops, all surprised, find the son of the President of Slovakia dead drunk in his car. So they arrest him and take him to the hospital to patch up his wounds.
So after a while the Austrian cops figure it's kind of embarrassing to have the Slovak President's son in the slammer, especially under these circumstances with the electric shocks and all. It's sort of as if Hillary Clinton had been beaten up and dumped in Canada and accused of shady dealing in Arkansas real estate. I mean, maybe you Canadians would have your suspicions about Hillary, but I figure you would probably want to give her back pronto. So the Austrians let Kovak Jr go back to Slovakia. He goes back plenty mad.
Well, the Slovaks get a cop to investigate this kidnapping, but the cop gets fired right away. You see, the cop swiftly discovered that these kidnappers were members of the Slovak Intelligence Service, which is a secret police agency in the pocket of the Prime Minister. Another cop took the job, he found out the same thing, and he got fired too. The head of the Slovak Intelligence Service arranged both of these firings. He complained that the police were being too rough on his secret police agents and endangering national security.
This is all a true story, ladies and gentlemen. I'm not embroidering this, in fact I'm sparing you some of the real Prisoner of Zenda elements because they're too melodramatic even for a science fiction writer. The scandal is looking pretty bad for the Prime Minister at this point, so he gets some of his allies in the Parliament to accuse the President of high treason.
That doesn't work out. The treason impeachment trial doesn't get off the ground, because the Prime Minister hasn't figured out how to swing votes in his own parliament. And also because the President himself has actually done anything.
At this point one of the original kidnappers becomes disgusted. He's a secret policeman and a torturer, but he just can't take it any more. He goes to the press and confesses everything. He testifies repeatedly, to the newspapers, to the radio, to the cops, that the head of the secret service was on the radio personally directing the whole affair.
Prime Minister Meciar and his secret police boss loudly deny this. They swiftly come up with an alternate story. They declare that the President's son kidnapped himself, tortured himself with electrodes, and dumped himself in Austria dead drunk, just to make the Prime Minister look bad.
Secret police agents then find the family of this guy whose confessed to the kidnapping, and they start beating them up. Later the guy's best friend is blown up by a car bomb. When the autopsy is performed the coroner finds a bullet in the dead man's stomach. The Prime Minister's stooges claim that the car blew up by accident and the bullets was an accidental bullet in the stomach that came from the victim's own gun when it accidentally went off in the terrific heat from the car's accidentally blowing up, and that it's terribly shocking and even libellous to allege that this was a political murder.