Emmanuel Goldstein: 2600, the H Word, and Forty Years of Holding the Line

The pen name Emmanuel Goldstein comes from George Orwell's 1984. In the novel, Goldstein is the regime's eternal scapegoat, the figure on whom the Two Minutes Hate is focused, the imagined enemy whose imagined existence justifies every state action against the population. Eric Corley, who took the name in his early twenties when he founded a small mimeographed publication about telephone phreaking in 1984, did so on purpose. The hacker community, in his consistent argument across the next forty years, has been treated by institutional power exactly the way Orwell's Goldstein was treated: as the convenient reason for every expansion of surveillance, every overbroad criminal statute, every prosecutorial overreach against people who had done very little wrong.

He did not pick a comfortable position to defend. He has been defending it without much wavering since 1984.

The quarterly publication he founded was called 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, named for the 2600 Hz tone that early phone phreakers used to seize toll lines on the AT&T long-distance network. The first issue came out in January 1984. The current issue, in 2026, is the most recent in an unbroken quarterly run of forty-two years. There is no other independent publication in the broader computer subculture with that kind of continuity.

Around 2600 the magazine, Goldstein has built a constellation of related projects. Off the Hook, his weekly radio show on WBAI in New York, has been on the air since 1988. The HOPE conference (Hackers on Planet Earth), which he organized first in 1994 and has continued biennially since, is one of the longest-running hacker gatherings in the world. The 2600 v Universal case in 1999 and 2000, in which he was the named defendant in a Digital Millennium Copyright Act lawsuit over linking to DVD decryption code, was a foundational test of how the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions would be interpreted.

He has done all of this from a position of relative obscurity outside the hacker community. He is not a household name. He is not a frequently cited expert in mainstream cybersecurity coverage. The people who know who he is know exactly who he is, and the rest of the world has mostly never heard of him. That asymmetry is a deliberate choice on his part. He has consistently prioritized the durability of the work over personal visibility.

The Magazine

2600 is, considered as a magazine, a thin quarterly that publishes technical articles, news commentary, reader letters, and a small amount of editorial. Issues run around fifty to sixty pages. The print run has shifted over the decades but has historically been in the tens of thousands. The magazine is sold on newsstands at major chains and through independent bookstores in addition to subscriber distribution, which has given it a substantial reach for a publication of its size.

The technical articles are written by readers. Some of them are professional security researchers writing under pseudonyms because their employers would not approve. Some are hobbyists writing about their own projects. Some are explicit how-to documents on topics ranging from telephone-system manipulation in the 1980s through wireless network analysis in the 2000s to modern hardware reverse engineering. The editorial position has always been that information about how systems work, including information about how systems can be subverted, is information the public has a legitimate interest in and a constitutional right to publish.

That position has gotten the magazine into legal trouble periodically across its history. The Universal case was the most prominent. In 1999, Universal Studios and the Motion Picture Association of America sued 2600 under the new Digital Millennium Copyright Act for posting and linking to copies of DeCSS, a piece of software that allowed DVD playback on Linux systems. Universal's argument was that DeCSS was illegal under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions, and that 2600's publication and linking constituted contributory infringement. 2600's defense, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation supported, was that DeCSS was speech protected by the First Amendment, that the magazine was engaging in journalism rather than facilitating piracy, and that the DMCA's language was unconstitutionally broad.

The case lost in district court in 2000 and lost again in the Second Circuit in 2001. The legal precedent established was that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions applied even to journalism that linked to circumvention code, and that the First Amendment did not require an exception for that journalism. The substantive impact on 2600 was a permanent injunction against publishing or linking to DeCSS. The substantive impact on the broader question of how the DMCA would be enforced has been substantial and has continued to play out in subsequent cases for the past twenty-five years.

Goldstein and 2600 lost the case. They are still publishing.

Off the Hook

Off the Hook started in 1988 on WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation's New York radio station. The show airs weekly and has run almost without interruption for thirty-eight years. The format is loose: news commentary, listener call-ins, technical conversations, occasional in-studio interviews with security researchers, lawyers, journalists, and other guests. The audience is part hacker community, part broader civil liberties listenership, part WBAI subscribers who tune in for whatever is on.

The continuity of the show is unusual. Most independent media projects of any kind do not survive thirty-eight years of weekly production. WBAI itself has gone through serious institutional crises during that period, including a near-bankruptcy in the early 2010s and an extended period of internal political conflict that nearly took the station off the air. Off the Hook continued through all of it.

The longer arc of the show as a documentary record is meaningful. If you wanted to construct a chronological narrative of how the hacker community thought about itself and its political situation from 1988 through the present, the Off the Hook archives would be one of the better primary sources available. The show has covered Operation Sundevil in real time. It has covered the Mitnick case in real time. It has covered the Crypto Wars in real time. It has covered every major federal computer crime prosecution of the past three and a half decades in real time, often with first-hand interviews of the defendants or their attorneys.

That kind of long-term observational record is what historians of the period will be using when the period stops being current and starts being history.

HOPE

The HOPE conference (Hackers on Planet Earth) launched in 1994 at Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan. The first one had a few hundred attendees and was organized substantially as an experiment in whether a hacker conference could work in the format of a public event open to anyone willing to pay an entry fee, in the style of professional industry conferences but with the cultural conventions of the hacker community.

It worked. HOPE has run biennially since with one or two extended-cycle exceptions, with the venue mostly remaining at Hotel Pennsylvania until that hotel closed in 2020 and forced HOPE 2022 onto a virtual format and HOPE 2024 to St John's University in Queens. The conference attracts a few thousand attendees per cycle. The talks are recorded and archived. The format has remained substantially the same: a mix of technical presentations, civil liberties commentary, art and music tracks, and a substantial volunteer and community presence that distinguishes HOPE from the more commercially-driven security conferences that dominate the broader industry.

The Hotel Pennsylvania closure in 2020 was treated as a significant cultural loss within the HOPE community. The hotel had been the venue for thirteen consecutive HOPE conferences. The room layouts, the bars, the lobby, the elevator situation, all of it had become part of the embedded knowledge of how HOPE worked. The 2024 move to St John's was a genuine institutional adjustment.

But HOPE continues. The 2026 cycle is in planning at the time of this writing. Goldstein continues to be the central organizing presence. The conference is a working institution, not a memorial.

What He Has Held

The line that Goldstein has held across forty years can be summarized in a sentence. The hacker community is a legitimate culture with legitimate pursuits, and treating its members as inherently suspicious or criminal is both factually wrong and politically dangerous. He has held that line through Operation Sundevil, through the Mitnick prosecution, through the Crypto Wars, through the post-September-2001 expansion of surveillance authority, through every wave of computer crime legislation, and through the decades of mainstream coverage that have alternately romanticized and demonized hackers as the cultural fashion required.

He has not been right about everything. He has been arguably too sympathetic to specific defendants whose actions were genuinely indefensible. He has been arguably too suspicious of every government action regardless of context. The political position he has occupied is openly civil-libertarian and openly skeptical of institutional power, and reasonable readers can disagree with specific stances he has taken on specific cases.

But the position he has held has been valuable to the hacker community in ways that most people inside that community do not always notice, because Goldstein and 2600 and HOPE and Off the Hook are part of the load-bearing infrastructure of how the community has continued to exist as a coherent culture across forty years of institutional pressure to dissolve it. The proposition that hackers are not criminals, which 2600 has been printing on its masthead since the Reagan administration, is a proposition that has had to be defended every year of those forty years. Goldstein has been one of the people doing the defending.

Coda

Eric Corley is in his sixties now. He still edits 2600. He still hosts Off the Hook. He still organizes HOPE. The institutional permanence of the work he has built around the Goldstein pen name is substantially out of proportion to the resources behind it. Most of what he has built has been done with small budgets, volunteer labor, and the long patience of a person who decided in his twenties what he was going to spend his career on and never seriously reconsidered.

The hacker community in 2026 is recognizably descended from the hacker community in 1984. That continuity is partly accident of how subcultures persist, but it is partly also the work of people who decided to maintain the institutions that make persistence possible. Goldstein is the clearest example of that kind of person.

Forty-two years of quarterly issues. Thirty-eight years of weekly radio. Thirty years of biennial conferences. The publication is still printing. The radio show is still on the air. The conference is still planning the next one.

The line is still held.