There's a word for people who can learn all the buzzwords of medicine without getting a diploma, serving an internship, or joining a professional medical association. We call these people "quacks." Quacks are a very interesting class of people. They're inventive and clever and make a lot of money. They've always made a lot of money, but with the free flow of specialized information on the Internet, incredible new vistas open up for quacks. I haven't seen many of these vistas fully exploited yet, but I rather expect to.

Information Society people may not be quacks exactly, but they sure do wear a lot of hats. I know people personally who are CD-ROM designers and software entrepreneurs and system administrators and security consultants and conference organizers, and that's all in one week. They are clever, inventive people who are quick studies and can brush up on the jargon of several widely different occupations and convince their clients that they are genuinely skilled and experienced.

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