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  ************ PPaarrtt FFoouurr:: TThhee CCiivviill LLiibbeerrttaarriiaannss ************

  The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have followed it thus far,
  has been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal. The story
  of the Civil Libertarians, though it partakes of all those other
  aspects, is profoundly and thoroughly political. In 1990, the
  obscure, long- simmering struggle over the ownership and nature of
  cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public. People from some
  of the oddest corners of American society suddenly found themselves
  public figures. Some of these people found this situation much more
  than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled, and tried to
  retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy subcultural
  niches. This was generally to prove a mistake. But the civil
  libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found themselves
  organizing, propagandizing, podiumpounding, persuading, touring,
  negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to interviews,
  squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly
  sophisticated, buck- and-wing upon the public stage.
  It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this
  competitive advantage.
  The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite. They
  find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their actions
  in front of the general public. Actually, hackers roundly despise
  the "ignorant" public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the
  system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among themselves, mostly
  in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of class warfare, youth rebellion
  or naive techie utopianism. Hackers must strut and boast in order to
  establish and preserve their underground reputations. But if they
  speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile
  surface-tension of the underground, and they will be harrassed or
  arrested. Over the longer term, most hackers stumble, get busted,
  get betrayed, or simply give up.
  As a political force, the digital underground is hamstrung.
  The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted
  seige. They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated
  public image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one
  another with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have
  suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't
  trust the public's judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded.
  Should the general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand
  its own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a
  grave threat to the specialized technical power and authority that
  the telcos have relished for over a century. The telcos do have
  strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise, influence
  in the halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement, and
  unbelievably vast amounts of money. But politically speaking, they
  lack genuine grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many
  friends.
  Cops know a lot of things other people don't know. But cops
  willingly reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they
  feel will meet their institutional purposes and further public
  order. Cops have respect, they have responsibilities, they have
  power in the streets and even power in the home, but cops don't do
  particularly well in limelight. When pressed, they will step out in
  the public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to cajole prominent
  citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the naive and misguided. But
  then they go back within their time-honored fortress of the station-
  house, the courtroom and the rule-book.
  The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born
  political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern
  truism that communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
  are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public agenda -
  - and keep it there -- is power. Fame is power. Simple personal
  fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the
  public's eye and ear.
  The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power" -
  - though they all owned computers, most were not particularly
  advanced computer experts. They had a good deal of money, but
  nowhere near the earthshaking wealth and the galaxy of resources
  possessed by telcos or federal agencies. They had no ability to
  arrest people. They carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-
  tricks.
  But they really knew how to network.
  Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have
  operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public
  hurly-burly. They have lectured audiences galore and talked to
  countless journalists, and have learned to refine their spiels.
  They've kept the cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped
  that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes and
  spent small fortunes on airfare and long- distance. In an
  information society, this open, overt, obvious activity has proven
  to be a profound advantage.
  In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled out of
  nowhere in particular, at warp speed. This "group" (actually, a
  networking gaggle of interested parties which scarcely deserves even
  that loose term) has almost nothing in the way of formal
  organization. Those formal civil libertarian organizations which did
  take an interest in cyberspace issues, mainly the Computer
  Professionals for Social Responsibility and the American Civil
  Liberties Union, were carried along by events in 1990, and acted
  mostly as adjuncts, underwriters or launching- pads.
  The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success of
  any of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990. At this writing, their
  future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their
  hands. This should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely
  lives and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.

                                   1.
  In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino, California, had a
  problem. Someone had illicitly copied a small piece of Apple's
  proprietary software, software which controlled an internal chip
  driving the Macintosh screen display. This Color QuickDraw source
  code was a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property.
  Only trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.
  But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise. This person
  (or persons) made several illicit copies of this source code,
  perhaps as many as two dozen. He (or she, or they) then put those
  illicit floppy disks into envelopes and mailed them to people all
  over America: people in the computer industry who were associated
  with, but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.
  The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological, and very
  hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it will be recalled, stole the fire
  of the Gods and gave this potent gift to the general ranks of
  downtrodden mankind. A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was
  implied for the corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu"
  Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod. The
  illicitly copied data was given away for free.
  The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the fate of the ancient
  Greek Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for centuries by the
  vengeful gods while an eagle tore and ate his liver. On the other
  hand, NuPrometheus chickened out somewhat by comparison with his
  role model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched
  and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's industrial rivals
  (or, in fact, to anyone else). Instead of giving fire to mankind, it
  was more as if NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part
  of a Bic lighter. The act was not a genuine work of industrial
  espionage. It was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in
  the face for the Apple corporate heirarchy.
  Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. Apple's
  founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both taken their leave long since.
  Their raucous core of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew
  of 1960s Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with
  the new button- down multimillion dollar regime at Apple. Many of
  the programmers and developers who had invented the Macintosh model
  in the early 1980s had also taken their leave of the company. It was
  they, not the current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had
  invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The NuPrometheus stunt was
  well-calculated to wound company morale.
  Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in high-profile
  intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft of
  trade secrets. These were likely the right people to call, and rumor
  has it that the entities responsible were in fact discovered by the
  FBI, and then quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus
  was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed.
  But there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal
  software. Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed
  to fade.
  In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found
  themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI.
  One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most unusual
  man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is perhaps best
  known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics
  for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues," "I Need a
  Miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the band since
  1970.
  Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist
  should be interviewed by the FBI in a computercrime case, it might
  be well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful
  Dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the
  numerous cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San
  Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and lysergic
  transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind,
  of applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color
  denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use. The
  symbols, and the realities, of Californian freak power surround the
  Grateful Dead like knotted macrame.
  The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees are
  radical Bohemians. This much is widely understood. Exactly what this
  implies in the 1990s is rather more problematic.
  The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy
  entertainers: number 20, according to Forbes magazine, right between
  M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of
  purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. They
  have been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.
  And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit
  tax specialists -- they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians -
  - this money has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess.
  The Dead have been quietly active for many years, funding various
  worthy activities in their extensive and widespread cultural
  community.
  The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American power
  establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force to be
  reckoned with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many
  places, both likely and unlikely.
  The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist
  rhetoric, but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On
  the contrary, like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent
  their entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic
  equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy
  that might happen to catch their fancy. And their fancy is quite
  extensive.
  The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,
  lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all
  descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's
  co- founder, used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.
  These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number
  of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between
  Bohemian and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort
  may have a set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief
  'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a
  multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy
  fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet
  of LSD, does virtual-reality computer- graphics demos in his lecture
  tours. John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He
  is, however, a ranking Deadhead.
  Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like
  "social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. But Barlow
  might be better described as a "poet" -- if one keeps in mind Percy
  Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators
  of the world."
  Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. In 1987,
  he narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the
  Wyoming State Senate. Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-
  generation scion of a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in
  his early forties, married and the father of three daughters.
  Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of
  consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle
  rancher sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications
  devotee.
  The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He
  genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from
  small-town Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large
  and lively crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates
  from all over the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing
  attractive: its fast- lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-
  endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer journalism, with marked
  success, as he was a quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent. He
  frequently travelled to San Francisco to network with Deadhead
  friends. There Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the
  Californian computer community, including friendships among the
  wilder spirits at Apple.
  In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of
  the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.
  Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area
  of his interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to
  struggle to explain the very nature of computer-crime to a
  headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling.
  Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his
  modem to the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers"
  generally under FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic
  community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus,"
  were tracing attendees of a suspect group called the Hackers
  Conference.
  The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a yearly
  Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts. The hackers
  of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do with the
  hackers of the digital underground. On the contrary, the hackers of
  this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech CEOs,
  consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This group of hackers
  were the exact sort of "hackers" most likely to react with militant
  fury at any criminal degradation of the term "hacker.")
  Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though
  his computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled
  by this anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.
  Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the
  Point Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy
  Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major
  launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort. Point Foundation's
  cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area Californians
  the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous. Rigid
  ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the Whole
  Earth Catalog. This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue
  during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of
  practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living,
  environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The Whole Earth
  Catalog, and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a
  National Book Award.
  With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the Whole Earth
  Catalog had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar;
  but in its magazine incarnation, CoEvolution Quarterly, the Point
  Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools
  and ideas."
  CoEvolution Quarterly, which started in 1974, was never a widely
  popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor,
  CoEvolution Quarterly failed to revolutionize Western civilization
  and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian
  paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation
  cakewalked a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age
  flakiness. CoEvolution Quarterly carried no advertising, cost a lot,
  and came out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white
  graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by
  subscription and word of mouth.
  It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers. And yet -- it
  never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in, year out, decade in,
  decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support
  the magazine. The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much
  in the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to
  understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in
  the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").
  But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by.
  Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, CoEvolution
  Quarterly suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered
  the computer revolution. Out came the Whole Earth Software Catalog
  of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tiedyed faithful,
  and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present
  company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers
  Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange
  new possibilities of digital counterculture. CoEvolution Quarterly
  folded its teepee, replaced by Whole Earth Software Review and
  eventually by Whole Earth Review (the magazine's present
  incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven
  Howard Rheingold).
  1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic
  Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system. As
  boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and
  remained one. It was local to San Francisco. It was huge, with
  multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. Its complex
  UNIX-based software might be most charitably described as
  "useropaque." It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices
  of a non-profit cultural foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed
  with fans of the Grateful Dead.
  Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area
  counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.
  Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as
  "Wellbeings") were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They
  tended to work in the information industry: hardware, software,
  telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and
  journalists were especially common on the Well, attracted by Point
  Foundation's open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."
  There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint
  about access codes or credit-card theft. No one used handles.
  Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble.
  Debates were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a
  rival had disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his
  credit card numbers.
  The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum
  for access and storage, and lost money for years -- but not enough
  to hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990,
  the Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a
  gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference
  itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing
  dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson
  debate that could last for months or years on end. In 1991, the
  Well's list of conferences looked like this.
                        CONFERENCES ON THE WELL

                      WELL "Screenzine" Digest    (g zine)

                      Best of the WELL - vintage material -     (g
  best)

   Index listing of new topics in all conferences -  (g newtops)

                          Business - Education
                         ----------------------

  Apple Library Users Group(g alug)      Agriculture       (g agri)
  Brainstorming          (g brain)       Classifieds       (g cla)
  Computer Journalism    (g cj)          Consultants       (g consult)
  Consumers              (g cons)        Design            (g design)
  Desktop Publishing     (g desk)        Disability        (g
  disability)
  Education              (g ed)          Energy            (g
  energy91)
  Entrepreneurs          (g entre)       Homeowners        (g home)
  Indexing               (g indexing)    Investments       (g invest)
  Kids91                 (g kids)        Legal             (g legal)
  One Person Business    (g one)         Periodical/newsletter(g per)
  Telecomm Law           (g tcl)         The Future        (g fut)
  Translators            (g trans)       Travel            (g tra)
  Work                   (g work)

                  Electronic Frontier Foundation    (g eff)
                  Computers, Freedom & Privacy      (g cfp)
    Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility  (g cpsr)

                     Social - Political - Humanities
                    ---------------------------------

  Aging                  (g gray)        AIDS              (g aids)
  Amnesty International  (g amnesty)     Archives          (g arc)
  Berkeley               (g berk)        Buddhist          (g
  wonderland)
  Christian              (g cross)       Couples           (g couples)
  Current Events         (g curr)        Dreams            (g dream)
  Drugs                  (g dru)         East Coast        (g east)
  Emotional Health****   (g private)     Erotica           (g eros)
  Environment            (g env)         Firearms          (g
  firearms)
  First Amendment        (g first)       Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
  Gay                    (g gay)         Gay (Private)#    (g gaypriv)
  Geography              (g geo)         German            (g german)
  Gulf War               (g gulf)        Hawaii            (g aloha)
  Health                 (g heal)        History           (g hist)
  Holistic               (g holi)        Interview         (g inter)
  Italian                (g ital)        Jewish            (g jew)
  Liberty                (g liberty)     Mind              (g mind)
  Miscellaneous          (g misc)        Men on the WELL** (g mow)
  Network Integration    (g origin)      Nonprofits        (g non)
  North Bay              (g north)       Northwest         (g nw)
  Pacific Rim            (g pacrim)      Parenting         (g par)
  Peace                  (g pea)         Peninsula         (g pen)
  Poetry                 (g poetry)      Philosophy        (g phi)
  Politics               (g pol)         Psychology        (g psy)
  Psychotherapy          (g therapy)     Recovery##        (g
  recovery)
  San Francisco          (g sanfran)     Scams             (g scam)
  Sexuality              (g sex)         Singles           (g singles)
  Southern               (g south)       Spanish           (g spanish)
  Spirituality           (g spirit)      Tibet             (g tibet)
  Transportation         (g transport)   True Confessions  (g tru)
  Unclear                (g unclear)     WELL Writer's Workshop***(g
  www)
  Whole Earth            (g we)          Women on the WELL*(g wow)
  Words                  (g words)       Writers           (g wri)

  **** Private Conference - mail wooly for entry
  ***Private conference - mail sonia for entry
  ** Private conference - mail flash for entry
  *  Private conference - mail reva for entry
  #  Private Conference - mail hudu for entry
  ## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry

                    Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
                    -----------------------------------
  ArtCom Electronic Net  (g acen)                 Audio-Videophilia (g
  aud)
  Bicycles               (g bike)                 Bay Area Tonight**(g
  bat)
  Boating                (g wet)                  Books             (g
  books)
  CD's                   (g cd)                   Comics            (g
  comics)
  Cooking                (g cook)                 Flying            (g
  flying)
  Fun                    (g fun)                  Games             (g
  games)
  Gardening              (g gard)                 Kids              (g
  kids)
  Nightowls*             (g owl)                  Jokes             (g
  jokes)
  MIDI                   (g midi)                 Movies            (g
  movies)
  Motorcycling           (g ride)                 Motoring          (g
  car)
  Music                  (g mus)                  On Stage          (g
  onstage)
  Pets                   (g pets)                 Radio             (g
  rad)
  Restaurant             (g rest)                 Science Fiction   (g
  sf)
  Sports                 (g spo)                  Star Trek         (g
  trek)
  Television             (g tv)                   Theater           (g
  theater)
  Weird                  (g weird)                Zines/Factsheet Five
  (g f5)
  * Open from midnight to 6am
  ** Updated daily

                               Grateful Dead
                               -------------
  Grateful Dead          (g gd)          Deadplan*         (g dp)
  Deadlit                (g deadlit)     Feedback          (g
  feedback)
  GD Hour                (g gdh)         Tapes             (g tapes)
  Tickets                (g tix)         Tours             (g tours)

  * Private conference - mail tnf for entry

                                 Computers
                                -----------
  AI/Forth/Realtime      (g realtime)    Amiga             (g amiga)
  Apple                  (g app)         Computer Books    (g cbook)
  Art & Graphics         (g gra)         Hacking           (g hack)
  HyperCard              (g hype)        IBM PC            (g ibm)
  LANs                   (g lan)         Laptop            (g lap)
  Macintosh              (g mac)         Mactech           (g mactech)
  Microtimes             (g microx)      Muchomedia        (g mucho)
  NeXt                   (g next)        OS/2              (g os2)
  Printers               (g print)       Programmer's Net  (g net)
  Siggraph               (g siggraph)    Software Design   (g sdc)
  Software/Programming   (software)      Software Support  (g ssc)
  Unix                   (g unix)        Windows           (g windows)
  Word Processing        (g word)

                          Technical - Communications
                         ----------------------------
  Bioinfo                (g bioinfo)        Info              (g
  boing)
  Media                  (g media)          NAPLPS            (g
  naplps)
  Netweaver              (g netweaver)      Networld          (g
  networld)
  Packet Radio           (g packet)         Photography       (g pho)
  Radio                  (g rad)            Science           (g
  science)
  Technical Writers      (g tec)            Telecommunications(g tele)
  Usenet                 (g usenet)         Video             (g vid)
  Virtual Reality        (g vr)

                                The WELL Itself
                                ---------------
  Deeper                 (g deeper)          Entry                  (g
  ent)
  General                (g gentech)         Help                   (g
  help)
  Hosts                  (g hosts)           Policy                 (g
  policy)
  System News            (g news)            Test                   (g
  test)

  The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye a
  dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain- climbing
  Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life confessions with
  bisexual word-processing Tibetans.
  But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each of these
  conferences was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising
  dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics. Each conference was
  commonly frequented by a fairly small, fairly like-minded community
  of perhaps a few dozen people. It was humanly impossible to
  encompass the entire Well (especially since access to the Well's
  mainframe computer was billed by the hour). Most longtime users
  contented themselves with a few favorite topical neighborhoods, with
  the occasional foray elsewhere for a taste of exotica. But
  especially important news items, and hot topical debates, could
  catch the attention of the entire Well community. Like any
  community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry Barlow, the
  silver- tongued and silver- modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead,
  ranked prominently among them. It was here on the Well that Barlow
  posted his true-life tale of computer-crime encounter with the FBI.
  The story, as might be expected, created a great stir. The Well was
  already primed for hacker controversy. In December 1989, Harper's
  magazine had hosted a debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit
  computer intrusion. While over forty various computer-mavens took
  part, Barlow proved a star in the debate. So did "Acid Phreak" and
  "Phiber Optik," a pair of young New York hacker-phreaks whose skills
  at telco switching-station intrusion were matched only by their
  apparently limitless hunger for fame. The advent of these two boldly
  swaggering outlaws in the precincts of the Well created a sensation
  akin to that of Black Panthers at a cocktail party for the radically
  chic. Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990. A
  devotee of the 2600 circle and stalwart of the New York hackers'
  group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was a splendid exemplar
  of the computer intruder as committed dissident. The eighteen- year-
  old Optik, a high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman,
  was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharpdressing, sharp-
  talking digital dude who was utterly and airily contemptuous of
  anyone's rules but his own. By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared
  in Harper's, Esquire, The New York Times, in countless public
  debates and conventions, even on a television show hosted by Geraldo
  Rivera.
  Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other Well mavens,
  Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well celebrity. Strangely, despite his
  thorny attitude and utter single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed to
  arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met
  him. He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to
  swagger, and, better yet, to actually demonstrate some off-the-wall
  digital stunt. He was a born media darling.
  Even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly
  unworldly and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker. He was
  so bold, so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even
  those who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his
  welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered
  seal pup.
  In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther King Day
  Crash), Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third NYC scofflaw named
  Scorpion were raided by the Secret Service. Their computers went out
  the door, along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks,
  compact disks, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid
  Phreak and Phiber Optik were accused of having caused the Crash.
  The mills of justice ground slowly. The case eventually fell into
  the hands of the New York State Police. Phiber had lost his
  machinery in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him
  for over a year. His predicament was extensively publicized on the
  Well, where it caused much resentment for police tactics. It's one
  thing to merely hear about a hacker raided or busted; it's another
  to see the police attacking someone you've come to know personally,
  and who has explained his motives at length. Through the Harper's
  debate on the Well, it had become clear to the Wellbeings that
  Phiber Optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything." In their own
  salad days, many Wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in pitched street-
  battles with police. They were inclined to indulgence for acts of
  civil disobedience. Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the
  draconian thoroughness of a typical hacker search-andseizure. It
  took no great stretch of imagination for them to envision themselves
  suffering much the same treatment.
  As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to
  sour, and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a
  raw deal from the hamhanded powers-that-be. The resultant issue of
  Harper's magazine posed the question as to whether computerintrusion
  was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've begun to wonder
  if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T
  owned all the caves."
  In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home,
  Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree
  Computer Tampering and Computer Trespass, New York state offenses.
  He was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a
  complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik pled guilty to
  the misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community
  service.
  This passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight
  people seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all. Deprived of
  his computer by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought
  himself a portable computer so the cops could no longer monitor the
  phone where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his
  depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of television
  cameras.
  The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik,
  but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound. As 1990
  rolled on, the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid,
  the Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The
  rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a
  concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
  The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their
  ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of
  "hacking"; if anything, this membrane of differentiation from
  straight society made the "computer community" feel different,
  smarter, better. They had never before been confronted, however, by
  a concerted vilification campaign.
  Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major
  anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating the controversy often
  stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they commonly dusted
  themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened. It was as
  if it were too much to believe that a 1960s freak from the Grateful
  Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation head-to-head
  and actually seemed to be winning!
  Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle
  of this kind. He had no formal legal or technical credentials.
  Barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar
  brilliance. He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He
  also had a journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-
  deprecating wit, and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.
  The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency in
  literary, artistic, or musical circles. A gifted critic can wield
  great artistic influence simply through defining the temper of the
  times, by coining the catch-phrases and the terms of debate that
  become the common currency of the period. (And as it happened,
  Barlow was a part-time art critic, with a special fondness for the
  Western art of Frederic Remington.)
  Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's striking
  science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a synonym for the present-
  day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks. Barlow was
  insistent that cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new
  world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of electronic
  communications, now made visible through the computer screen, could
  no longer be usefully regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring.
  Instead, it had become a place, cyberspace, which demanded a new set
  of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as Barlow
  employed it, struck a useful chord, and this concept of cyberspace
  was picked up by Time, Scientific American, computer police,
  hackers, and even Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now seems
  likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.
  Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggyfaced, bearded,
  deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans,
  jacket, cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present
  Grateful Dead cloisonne lapel pin. Armed with a modem, however,
  Barlow was truly in his element. Formal hierarchies were not
  Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the
  "large organizations and their drones," with their uptight,
  institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the freespirit
  persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and jacks-in-office.
  But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was a cyberspace
  ad-hocrat par excellence.
  There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow,
  and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation
  only seemed to require a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many
  people must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than
  they'd ever bargained for.
  Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI
  struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on
  the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they
  liked it not one whit better than he did.
  One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet
  program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development
  Corporation. Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being
  fingerprinted down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but
  Barlow's post made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet
  clear to Kapor. The issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the
  Secret Service swung into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990,
  Kapor watched every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm.
  As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed
  Kapor for a California computer journal. Like most people who met
  Barlow, Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon
  himself to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the
  situation. Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee
  of the Whole Earth Catalog since the beginning, and treasured a
  complete run of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a
  private jet. In pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of
  Kapor Enterprises Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding
  company, Kapor commonly crossed state lines with about as much
  thought as one might give to faxing a letter.
  The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the
  start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a
  manifesto, "Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's,
  intention to form a political organization to "raise and disburse
  funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating
  to digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into
  Cyberspace."
  Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would "fund,
  conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret
  Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free
  speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue
  force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is
  arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional."
  "Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer
  networking channels, and also printed in the Whole Earth Review. The
  sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from
  the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak
  (perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to
  match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation.
  John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately
  offered his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore,
  an ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of
  electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and
  corporate computer-assisted surveillance of private citizens.
  A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies: Stewart
  Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers Jaron Lanier
  and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nat
  Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on a formal
  title: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated. Kapor
  became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point
  Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared "the home of the
  Electronic Frontier Foundation."
  Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like their nineteenth-
  century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas
  Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s
  -- people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot,
  who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to dominate a
  glittering new industry -- had always made very good copy. But while
  the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed nonplussed by
  the self-declared "civilizers of cyberspace." EFF's insistence that
  the war against "hackers" involved grave Constitutional civil
  liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially since none
  of EFF's organizers were lawyers or established politicians. The
  business press in particular found it easier to seize on the
  apparent core of the story -- that high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell
  Kapor had established a "defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a
  genuinely important political development -- or merely a clique of
  wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the proper
  authorities? The jury was still out.
  But the stage was now set for open confrontation. And the first and
  the most critical battle was the hacker show-trial of "Knight
  Lightning."

                                   2.
  It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers
  only by their "handles." There is little to gain by giving the real
  names of these people, many of whom are juveniles, many of whom have
  never been convicted of any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting
  parents who have already suffered enough.
  But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990, made this
  particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure. It can do no
  particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat the long-
  established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (pronounced NYE-
  dorf).
  Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States District Court,
  Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the Honorable
  Nicholas J. Bua presiding. The United States of America was the
  plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney was
  Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.
  The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer
  Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin,
  and David A. Glockner, all Assistant United States Attorneys. The
  Secret Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.
  It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground
  hacker "magazine" called Phrack. Phrack was an entirely electronic
  publication, distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic
  networks. It was amateur publication given away for free. Neidorf
  had never made any money for his work in Phrack. Neither had his
  unindicted co-editor "Taran King" or any of the numerous Phrack
  contributors. The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force,
  however, had decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster. To
  formally admit that Phrack was a "magazine" and Neidorf a
  "publisher" was to open a prosecutorial Pandora's Box of First
  Amendment issues. To do this was to play into the hands of Zenner
  and his EFF advisers, which now included a phalanx of prominent New
  York civil rights lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of
  Katten, Muchin and Zavis. Instead, the prosecution relied heavily on
  the issue of access device fraud: Section 1029 of Title 18, the
  section from which the Secret Service drew its most direct
  jurisdiction over computer crime.
  Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911 Document. He was
  accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the Prophet,
  who, it will be recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had
  illicitly copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX system.
  The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the Neidorf case,
  part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's
  E911 Document (and to pass the Document across state lines, which
  helped establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case). The Prophet,
  in the spirit of full co-operation, had agreed to testify against
  Neidorf.
  In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to testify
  against Neidorf. Their own federal prosecutors in Atlanta had
  charged the Atlanta Three with: (a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud,
  (c) wire fraud, (d) access device fraud, and (e) interstate
  transportation of stolen property (Title 18, Sections 371, 1030,
  1343, 1029, and 2314).
  Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and Leftist had ducked
  any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges -- one
  conspiracy count apiece. Urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of
  Section 1029 which makes it illegal to possess "fifteen or more"
  illegal access devices (in his case, computer passwords). And their
  sentences were scheduled for September 14, 1990 -- well after the
  Neidorf trial. As witnesses, they could presumably be relied upon to
  behave. Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most everyone else
  caught up in the crackdown had "cooperated fully" and pled guilty in
  hope of reduced sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception,
  of course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the very
  beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in court -- Steve
  Jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.)
  Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf was a political
  science major and was disinclined to go to jail for "fraud" when he
  had not made any money, had not broken into any computer, and had
  been publishing a magazine that he considered protected under the
  First Amendment.
  Neidorf's trial was the only legal action of the entire Crackdown
  that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public
  test in front of a jury of American citizens.
  Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He had voluntarily
  handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment.
  He had already admitted in writing that he knew that the E911
  Document had been stolen before he had "published" it in Phrack -
  - or, from the prosecution's point of view, illegally transported
  stolen property by wire in something purporting to be a
  "publication."
  But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document was not held to
  be a crime, that wouldn't let Neidorf off the hook. Neidorf had
  still received the E911 Document when Prophet had transferred it to
  him from Rich Andrews' Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly
  hadn't been "published" -- it was hacker booty, pure and simple,
  transported across state lines.
  The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to indict Neidorf on
  a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years.
  When some of these charges were successfully challenged before
  Neidorf actually went to trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged
  his indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty
  years! As a first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would
  in fact receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task Force
  clearly intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and his
  conspiratorial "magazine" put permanently out of commission. This
  was a federal case, and Neidorf was charged with the fraudulent
  theft of property worth almost eighty thousand dollars.
  William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions with
  symbolic overtones. He often published articles on his work in the
  security trade press, arguing that "a clear message had to be sent
  to the public at large and the computer community in particular that
  unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of computerized
  information would not be tolerated by the courts."
  The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics somewhat
  unorthodox, but the Chicago Task Force had proved sure-footed to
  date. "Shadowhawk" had been bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task
  Force, and sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine.
  The Shadowhawk case involved charges under Section 1030, the
  "federal interest computer" section.
  Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of "federal-interest"
  computers per se. On the contrary, Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T
  home computer, seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T.
  He had bragged on the underground boards "Phreak Klass 2600" and
  "Dr. Ripco" of his skills at raiding AT&T, and of his intention to
  crash AT&T's national phone system. Shadowhawk's brags were noticed
  by Henry Kluepfel of Bellcore Security, scourge of the outlaw
  boards, whose relations with the Chicago Task Force were long and
  intimate. The Task Force successfully established that Section 1030
  applied to the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the objections of his
  defense attorney. Shadowhawk had entered a computer "owned" by U.S.
  Missile Command and merely "managed" by AT&T. He had also entered an
  AT&T computer located at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia.
  Attacking AT&T was of "federal interest" whether Shadowhawk had
  intended it or not.
  The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece of AT&T
  software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied from Bell Labs, the
  "Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert System," was worth a cool one
  million dollars. Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that Shadowhawk
  had not sold the program and had made no profit from the illicit
  copying. And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System was experimental
  software, and had no established market value because it had never
  been on the market in the first place. AT&T's own assessment of a
  "one million dollar" figure for its own intangible property was
  accepted without challenge by the court, however. And the court
  concurred with the government prosecutors that Shadowhawk showed
  clear "intent to defraud" whether he'd gotten any money or not.
  Shadowhawk went to jail.
  The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been the conviction
  and jailing of "Kyrie." Kyrie, a true denizen of the digital
  criminal underground, was a 36-year-old Canadian woman, convicted
  and jailed for telecommunications fraud in Canada. After her release
  from prison, she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell and the Royal
  Canadian Mounted Police, and eventually settled, very unwisely, in
  Chicago.
  "Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance Information,"
  specialized in voice-mail abuse. She assembled large numbers of hot
  long- distance codes, then read them aloud into a series of
  corporate voice-mail systems. Kyrie and her friends were electronic
  squatters in corporate voice- mail systems, using them much as if
  they were pirate bulletin boards, then moving on when their vocal
  chatter clogged the system and the owners necessarily wised up.
  Kyrie's camp followers were a loose tribe of some hundred and fifty
  phone-phreaks, who followed her trail of piracy from machine to
  machine, ardently begging for her services and expertise.
  Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit-card numbers, in exchange
  for her stolen "long distance information." Some of Kyrie's clients
  paid her off in cash, by scamming credit-card cash advances from
  Western Union.
  Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline tickets and
  hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen credit cards. Tiring of
  this, she found refuge with a fellow female phone phreak in Chicago.
  Kyrie's hostess, like a surprising number of phone phreaks, was
  blind. She was also physically disabled. Kyrie allegedly made the
  best of her new situation by applying for, and receiving, state
  welfare funds under a false identity as a qualified caretaker for
  the handicapped.
  Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had also vanished
  underground with her; these pre-teen digital refugees had no legal
  American identity, and had never spent a day in school.
  Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and enthralled by her own
  cleverness and the ardent worship of her teenage followers. This
  foolishly led her to phone up Gail Thackeray in Arizona, to boast,
  brag, strut, and offer to play informant. Thackeray, however, had
  already learned far more than enough about Kyrie, whom she roundly
  despised as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a "female Fagin."
  Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's boasts to the Secret Service.
  Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May 1989. She confessed
  at great length and pled guilty.
  In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague Colleen Coughlin
  sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for computer and
  telecommunications fraud. This was a markedly severe sentence by the
  usual wrist-slapping standards of "hacker" busts. Seven of Kyrie's
  foremost teenage disciples were also indicted and convicted. The
  Kyrie "high-tech street gang," as Cook described it, had been
  crushed. Cook and his colleagues had been the first ever to put
  someone in prison for voice-mail abuse. Their pioneering efforts had
  won them attention and kudos.
  In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home to the readers
  of Security Management magazine, a trade journal for corporate
  security professionals. The case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff
  sentence, "reflect a new reality for hackers and computer crime
  victims in the '90s.... Individuals and corporations who report
  computer and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their
  cooperation with federal law enforcement will result in meaningful
  punishment. Companies and the public at large must report computer-
  enhanced crimes if they want prosecutors and the course to protect
  their rights to the tangible and intangible property developed and
  stored on computers."
  Cook had made it his business to construct this "new reality for
  hackers." He'd also made it his business to police corporate
  property rights to the intangible.
  Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a "hacker defense fund"
  as that term was generally understood, they presumably would have
  stood up for Kyrie. Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message"
  that federal heat was coming down on "hackers." But Kyrie found no
  defenders at EFF, or anywhere else, for that matter. EFF was not a
  bail-out fund for electronic crooks.
  The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in certain ways. The
  victim once again was allowed to set the value of the "stolen"
  property. Once again Kluepfel was both investigator and technical
  advisor. Once again no money had changed hands, but the "intent to
  defraud" was central.
  The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness early on. The Task
  Force had originally hoped to prove Neidorf the center of a
  nationwide Legion of Doom criminal conspiracy. The Phrack editors
  threw physical get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers
  from across the country; generally two dozen or so of the magazine's
  favorite contributors and readers. (Such conventions were common in
  the hacker community; 2600 Magazine, for instance, held public
  meetings of hackers in New York, every month.) LoD heavy-dudes were
  always a strong presence at these Phrack-sponsored "Summercons."
  In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator" attended Summercon
  in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis. Dictator was one of Gail
  Thackeray's underground informants; Dictator's underground board in
  Phoenix was a sting operation for the Secret Service. Dictator
  brought an undercover crew of Secret Service agents to Summercon.
  The agents bored spyholes through the wall of Dictator's hotel room
  in St Louis, and videotaped the frolicking hackers through a one-way
  mirror. As it happened, however, nothing illegal had occurred on
  videotape, other than the guzzling of beer by a couple of minors.
  Summercons were social events, not sinister cabals. The tapes showed
  fifteen hours of raucous laughter, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and
  back-slapping.
  Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret Service tapes
  before the trial. Zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness of
  this meeting, which Cook had earlier characterized as a sinister
  interstate conspiracy to commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the
  Summercon tapes to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings by the
  Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant." The E911
  Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally been valued
  at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence
  booty, the E911 Document was not software -- it was written in
  English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this value -- for a
  twelve-page bureaucratic document -frankly incredible. In his "Crime
  and Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will
  probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I
  like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph
  Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."
  As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in fact,
  eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom
  -- but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.
  Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the
  document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the
  production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as follows:
  1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911
  Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A
  Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31
  an hour, made: $6,200.
  2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had
  cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
  3. Two days of editing cost $367. `
  4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
  5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and
  the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth
  bureaucracy, cost $129.
  6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took
  fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
  7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each,
  totalling $43.
  Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a
  whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve-
  page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five
  weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but
  watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two
  days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already
  available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee
  who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
  But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware
  expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor.
  Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II
  computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two
  thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand
  five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the
  twelve-page Document.
  Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for
  maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though
  mentioned, had been left off the final $79,449 total, apparently
  through a merciful oversight).
  Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to William Cook
  himself, at the office of the Chicago federal attorneys. The United
  States Government accepted these telco figures without question.
  As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911 Document was
  officially revised downward. This time, Robert Kibler of BellSouth
  Security estimated the value of the twelve pages as a mere
  $24,639.05 -- based, purportedly, on "R&D costs." But this specific
  estimate, right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at
  all; in fact it provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.
  The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary information
  have always been peculiar. It could be argued that BellSouth had not
  "lost" its E911 Document at all in the first place, and therefore
  had not suffered any monetary damage from this "theft." And Sheldon
  Zenner did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial -- that Prophet's
  raid had not been "theft," but was better understood as illicit
  copying.
  The money, however, was not central to anyone's true purposes in
  this trial. It was not Cook's strategy to convince the jury that the
  E911 Document was a major act of theft and should be punished for
  that reason alone. His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document
  was dangerous. It was his intention to establish that the E911
  Document was "a road-map" to the Enhanced 911 System. Neidorf had
  deliberately and recklessly distributed a dangerous weapon. Neidorf
  and the Prophet did not care (or perhaps even gloated at the
  sinister idea) that the E911 Document could be used by hackers to
  disrupt 911 service, "a life line for every person certainly in the
  Southern Bell region of the United States, and indeed, in many
  communities throughout the United States," in Cook's own words.
  Neidorf had put people's lives in danger.
  In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911
  Document was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the
  Neidorf trial. The jury itself would not be allowed to ever see this
  Document, lest it slip into the official court records, and thus
  into the hands of the general public, and, thus, somehow, to
  malicious hackers who might lethally abuse it.
  Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a clever legal
  maneuver, but it had a severe flaw. There were, in point of fact,
  hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, already in possession of the
  E911 Document, just as Phrack had published it. Its true nature was
  already obvious to a wide section of the interested public (all of
  whom, by the way, were, at least theoretically, party to a gigantic
  wire-fraud conspiracy). Most everyone in the electronic community
  who had a modem and any interest in the Neidorf case already had a
  copy of the Document. It had already been available in Phrack for
  over a year.
  People, even quite normal people without any particular prurient
  interest in forbidden knowledge, did not shut their eyes in terror
  at the thought of beholding a "dangerous" document from a telephone
  company. On the contrary, they tended to trust their own judgement
  and simply read the Document for themselves. And they were not
  impressed.
  One such person was John Nagle. Nagle was a fortyone-year-old
  professional programmer with a masters' degree in computer science
  from Stanford. He had worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had
  invented a computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle
  Algorithm," and for the prominent Californian computergraphics firm
  "Autodesk," where he was a major stockholder.
  Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much respected for
  his technical knowledgeability.
  Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely, for he was an
  ardent telecommunicator. He was no particular friend of computer
  intruders, but he believed electronic publishing had a great deal to
  offer society at large, and attempts to restrain its growth, or to
  censor free electronic expression, strongly roused his ire.
  The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both being discussed
  in detail on the Internet, in an electronic publication called
  Telecom Digest. Nagle, a longtime Internet maven, was a regular
  reader of Telecom Digest. Nagle had never seen a copy of Phrack, but
  the implications of the case disturbed him.
  While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on robotics, Nagle
  happened across a book called The Intelligent Network. Thumbing
  through it at random, Nagle came across an entire chapter
  meticulously detailing the workings of E911 police emergency
  systems. This extensive text was being sold openly, and yet in
  Illinois a young man was in danger of going to prison for publishing
  a thin six-page document about 911 service.
  Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in Telecom Digest. From
  there, Nagle was put in touch with Mitch Kapor, and then with
  Neidorf's lawyers.
  Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer telecommunications
  expert willing to speak up for Neidorf, one who was not a wacky
  teenage "hacker." Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd
  once had a federal security clearance.
  Nagle was asked to fly to Illinois to join the defense team.
  Having joined the defense as an expert witness, Nagle read the
  entire E911 Document for himself. He made his own judgement about
  its potential for menace.
  The time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to have a look
  at the E911 Document. This six-page piece of work was the pretext
  for a federal prosecution that could have sent an electronic
  publisher to prison for thirty, or even sixty, years. It was the
  pretext for the search and seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a
  legitimate publisher of printed books. It was also the formal
  pretext for the search and seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board,
  "Phoenix Project," and for the raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe. It
  also had much to do with the seizure of Richard Andrews' Jolnet node
  and the shutdown of Charles Boykin's AT&T node. The E911 Document
  was the single most important piece of evidence in the Hacker
  Crackdown. There can be no real and legitimate substitute for the
  document itself.
  ************ PPhhrraacckk IInncc.. ************
  Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13
  Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services For Special
  Services and Account Centers by the Eavesdropper
  March, 1988
  ********** DDeessccrriippttiioonn ooff SSeerrvviiccee **********
  The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
  accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of the
  following centers:
      * Special Services Center (SSC)
      * Major Accounts Center (MAC)
      * Serving Test Center (STC)
      * Toll Control Center (TCC)
  The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document interchangeably for
  any of these four centers. The Special Services Centers (SSCs) or
  Major Account Centers (MACs) have been designated as the trouble
  reporting contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.
  Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue to
  contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the trouble to
  the SSC/MAC, when appropriate.
  Due to the critical nature of E911 service, the control and timely
  repair of troubles is demanded. As the primary E911 customer
  contact, the SSC/MAC is in the unique position to monitor the status
  of the trouble and insure its resolution.
  ********** SSyysstteemm OOvveerrvviieeww **********
  The number 911 is intended as a nationwide universal telephone
  number which provides the public with direct access to a Public
  Safety Answering Point (PSAP). A PSAP is also referred to as an
  Emergency Service Bureau (ESB). A PSAP is an agency or facility
  which is authorized by a municipality to receive and respond to
  police, fire and/or ambulance services. One or more attendants are
  located at the PSAP facilities to receive and handle calls of an
  emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal
  requirements.
  An important advantage of E911 emergency service is improved
  (reduced) response times for emergency services. Also close
  coordination among agencies providing various emergency services is
  a valuable capability provided by E911 service.
  1A ESS is used as the tandem office for the E911 network to route
  all 911 calls to the correct (primary) PSAP designated to serve the
  calling station. The E911 feature was developed primarily to provide
  routing to the correct PSAP for all 911 calls. Selective routing
  allows a 911 call originated from a particular station located in a
  particular district, zone, or town, to be routed to the primary PSAP
  designated to serve that customer station regardless of wire center
  boundaries. Thus, selective routing eliminates the problem of wire
  center boundaries not coinciding with district or other political
  boundaries.
  The services available with the E911 feature include:
      * Forced Disconnect
      * Default Routing, Alternative Routing
      * Night Service Selective Routing
      * Automatic Number Identification (ANI)
      * Selective Transfer
      * Automatic Location Identification (ALI)
  ********** PPrreesseerrvviiccee//IInnssttaallllaattiioonn GGuuiiddeelliinneess **********
  When a contract for an E911 system has been signed, it is the
  responsibility of Network Marketing to establish an implementation/
  cutover committee which should include a representative from the
  SSC/MAC. Duties of the E911 Implementation Team include coordination
  of all phases of the E911 system deployment and the formation of an
  on-going E911 maintenance subcommittee.
  Marketing is responsible for providing the following customer
  specific information to the SSC/MAC prior to the start of call
  through testing:
      * All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)
      * All PSAP circuit ID's
      * 1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each PSAP
        (1004 Section K, L, M)
      * Network configuration
      * Any vendor information (name, telephone number, equipment)
  The SSC/MAC needs to know if the equipment and sets at the PSAP are
  maintained by the BOCs, an independent company, or an outside
  vendor, or any combination. This information is then entered on the
  PSAP profile sheets and reviewed quarterly for changes, additions
  and deletions.
  Marketing will secure the Major Account Number (MAN) and provide
  this number to Corporate Communications so that the initial issue of
  the service orders carry the MAN and can be tracked by the SSC/MAC
  via CORDNET. PSAP circuits are official services by definition.
  All service orders required for the installation of the E911 system
  should include the MAN assigned to the city/county which has
  purchased the system.
  In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning, the
  SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Node to PSAP
  circuits (official services) and any other services for this
  customer. Training must be scheduled for all SSC/MAC involved
  personnel during the pre-service stage of the project.
  The E911 Implementation Team will form the on-going maintenance
  subcommittee prior to the initial implementation of the E911 system.
  This sub-committee will establish post implementation quality
  assurance procedures to ensure that the E911 system continues to
  provide quality service to the customer. Customer/Company training,
  trouble reporting interfaces for the customer, telephone company and
  any involved independent telephone companies needs to be addressed
  and implemented prior to E911 cutover. These functions can be best
  addressed by the formation of a sub- committee of the E911
  Implementation Team to set up guidelines for and to secure service
  commitments of interfacing organizations. A SSC/MAC supervisor
  should chair this subcommittee and include the following
  organizations:
      * Switching Control Center
            o E911 translations
            o Trunking
            o End office and Tandem office hardware/software
      * Recent Change Memory Administration Center
            o Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations
            o Processes validity errors and rejects
      * Line and Number Administration
            o Verification of TN/ESN translations
      * Special Service Center/Major Account Center
            o Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host
              troubles
            o Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports
            o Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation
            o Customer notification of status and restoration
            o Analyzation of "chronic" troubles
            o Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits
      * Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)
            o Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and Telco owned
              sets
      * Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
            o E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)
      * Area Maintenance Engineer
            o Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network related
              E911 troubles
  ********** MMaaiinntteennaannccee GGuuiiddeelliinneess **********
  The CCNC will test the Node circuit from the 202T at the Host site
  to the 202T at the Node site. Since Host to Node (CCNC to MMOC)
  circuits are official company services, the CCNC will refer all Node
  circuit troubles to the SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for the
  testing and follow up to restoration of these circuit troubles.
  Although Node to PSAP circuit are official services, the MMOC will
  refer PSAP circuit troubles to the appropriate SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC
  is responsible for testing and follow up to restoration of PSAP
  circuit troubles.
  The SSC/MAC will also receive reports from CRSAB/IMC(s) on
  subscriber 911 troubles when they are not line troubles. The SSC/MAC
  is responsible for testing and restoration of these troubles.
  Maintenance responsibilities are as follows:
  SCC*            Voice Network (ANI to PSAP)
                  *SCC responsible for tandem switch
  SSIM/I&M        PSAP Equipment (Modems, CIU's, sets)
  Vendor          PSAP Equipment (when CPE)
  SSC/MAC         PSAP to Node circuits, and tandem to PSAP voice
                  circuits (EMNT)
  MMOC            Node site (Modems, cables, etc)
      * Note: All above work groups are required to resolve troubles
        by interfacing with appropriate work groups for resolution.
  The Switching Control Center (SCC) is responsible for E911/1AESS
  translations in tandem central offices. These translations route
  E911 calls, selective transfer, default routing, speed calling,
  etc., for each PSAP. The SCC is also responsible for troubleshooting
  on the voice network (call originating to end office tandem
  equipment).
  For example, ANI failures in the originating offices would be a
  responsibility of the SCC.
  Recent Change Memory Administration Center (RCMAC) performs the
  daily tandem translation updates (recent change) for routing of
  individual telephone numbers.
  Recent changes are generated from service order activity (new
  service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into a daily file by
  the E911 Center (ALI/DMS E911 Computer).
  SSIM/I&M is responsible for the installation and repair of PSAP
  equipment. PSAP equipment includes ANI Controller, ALI Controller,
  data sets, cables, sets, and other peripheral equipment that is not
  vendor owned. SSIM/I&M is responsible for establishing maintenance
  test kits, complete with spare parts for PSAP maintenance. This
  includes test gear, data sets, and ANI/ALI Controller parts.
  Special Services Center (SSC) or Major Account Center (MAC) serves
  as the trouble reporting contact for all (PSAP) troubles reported by
  customer. The SSC/MAC refers troubles to proper organizations for
  handling and tracks status of troubles, escalating when necessary.
  The SSC/MAC will close out troubles with customer. The SSC/MAC will
  analyze all troubles and tracks "chronic" PSAP troubles.
  Corporate Communications Network Center (CCNC) will test and refer
  troubles on all node to host circuits. All E911 circuits are
  classified as official company property.
  The Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center (MMOC) maintains the
  E911 (ALI/DMS) computer hardware at the Host site. This MMOC is also
  responsible for monitoring the system and reporting certain PSAP and
  system problems to the local MMOC's, SCC's or SSC/MAC's. The MMOC
  personnel also operate software programs that maintain the TN data
  base under the direction of the E911 Center. The maintenance of the
  NODE computer (the interface between the PSAP and the ALI/DMS
  computer) is a function of the MMOC at the NODE site. The MMOC's at
  the NODE sites may also be involved in the testing of NODE to Host
  circuits. The MMOC will also assist on Host to PSAP and data network
  related troubles not resolved through standard trouble clearing
  procedures.
  Installation And Maintenance Center (IMC) is responsible for
  referral of E911 subscriber troubles that are not subscriber line
  problems.
  E911 Center - Performs the role of System Administration and is
  responsible for overall operation of the E911 computer software. The
  E911 Center does A-Z trouble analysis and provides statistical
  information on the performance of the system.
  This analysis includes processing PSAP inquiries (trouble reports)
  and referral of network troubles. The E911 Center also performs
  daily processing of tandem recent change and provides information to
  the RCMAC for tandem input. The E911 Center is responsible for daily
  processing of the ALI/DMS computer data base and provides error
  files, etc. to the Customer Services department for investigation
  and correction. The E911 Center participates in all system
  implementations and on-going maintenance effort and assists in the
  development of procedures, training and education of information to
  all groups.
  Any group receiving a 911 trouble from the SSC/MAC should close out
  the trouble with the SSC/MAC or provide a status if the trouble has
  been referred to another group. This will allow the SSC/MAC to
  provide a status back to the customer or escalate as appropriate.
  Any group receiving a trouble from the Host site (MMOC or CCNC)
  should close the trouble back to that group.
  The MMOC should notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the Host, Node,
  or all Node circuits are down so that the SSC/MAC can reply to
  customer reports that may be called in by the PSAPs. This will
  eliminate duplicate reporting of troubles. On complete outages the
  MMOC will follow escalation procedures for a Node after two (2)
  hours and for a PSAP after four (4) hours. Additionally the MMOC
  will notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the Host, Node, or all Node
  circuits are down.
  The PSAP will call the SSC/MAC to report E911 troubles. The person
  reporting the E911 trouble may not have a circuit I.D. and will
  therefore report the PSAP name and address. Many PSAP troubles are
  not circuit specific. In those instances where the caller cannot
  provide a circuit I.D., the SSC/MAC will be required to determine
  the circuit I.D. using the PSAP profile. Under no circumstances will
  the SSC/MAC Center refuse to take the trouble. The E911 trouble
  should be handled as quickly as possible, with the SSC/MAC providing
  as much assistance as possible while taking the trouble report from
  the caller.
  The SSC/MAC will screen/test the trouble to determine the
  appropriate handoff organization based on the following criteria:
      * PSAP equipment problem: SSIM/I&M
      * Circuit problem: SSC/MAC
      * Voice network problem: SCC (report trunk group number)
      * Problem affecting multiple PSAPs (No ALI report from all
        PSAPs): Contact the MMOC to check for NODE or Host computer
        problems before further testing.
  The SSC/MAC will track the status of reported troubles and escalate
  as appropriate. The SSC/MAC will close out customer/company reports
  with the initiating contact. Groups with specific maintenance
  responsibilities, defined above, will investigate "chronic" troubles
  upon request from the SSC/MAC and the ongoing maintenance
  subcommittee.
  All "out of service" E911 troubles are priority one type reports.
  One link down to a PSAP is considered a priority one trouble and
  should be handled as if the PSAP was isolated.
  The PSAP will report troubles with the ANI controller, ALI
  controller or set equipment to the SSC/MAC.
  NO ANI: Where the PSAP reports NO ANI (digital display screen is
  blank) ask if this condition exists on all screens and on all calls.
  It is important to differentiate between blank screens and screens
  displaying 911-00XX, or all zeroes.
  When the PSAP reports all screens on all calls, ask if there is any
  voice contact with callers. If there is no voice contact the trouble
  should be referred to the SCC immediately since 911 calls are not
  getting through which may require alternate routing of calls to
  another PSAP.
  When the PSAP reports this condition on all screens but not all
  calls and has voice contact with callers, the report should be
  referred to SSIM/I&M for dispatch. The SSC/MAC should verify with
  the SCC that ANI is pulsing before dispatching SSIM.
  When the PSAP reports this condition on one screen for all calls
  (others work fine) the trouble should be referred to SSIM/I&M for
  dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to one piece of equipment
  at the customer premise.
  An ANI failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ANI has not been
  received by the PSAP from the tandem office or was lost by the PSAP
  ANI controller. The PSAP may receive "02" alarms which can be caused
  by the ANI controller logging more than three all zero failures on
  the same trunk. The PSAP has been instructed to report this
  condition to the SSC/MAC since it could indicate an equipment
  trouble at the PSAP which might be affecting all subscribers calling
  into the PSAP. When all zeroes are being received on all calls or
  "02" alarms continue, a tester should analyze the condition to
  determine the appropriate action to be taken. The tester must
  perform cooperative testing with the SCC when there appears to be a
  problem on the Tandem-PSAP trunks before requesting dispatch.
  When an occasional all zero condition is reported, the SSC/MAC
  should dispatch SSIM/I&M to routine equipment on a "chronic"
  troublesweep.
  The PSAPs are instructed to report incidental ANI failures to the
  BOC on a PSAP inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that is sent to the
  Customer Services E911 group and forwarded to E911 center when
  required. This usually involves only a particular telephone number
  and is not a condition that would require a report to the SSC/MAC.
  Multiple ANI failures which our from the same end office (XX denotes
  end office), indicate a hard trouble condition may exist in the end
  office or end office tandem trunks. The PSAP will report this type
  of condition to the SSC/MAC and the SSC/MAC should refer the report
  to the SCC responsible for the tandem office. NOTE: XX is the ESCO
  (Emergency Service Number) associated with the incoming 911 trunks
  into the tandem. It is important that the C/MAC tell the SCC what is
  displayed at the PSAP (i.e. 911-0011) which indicates to the SCC
  which end office is in trouble.
      * Note: It is essential that the PSAP fill out inquiry form on
        every ANI failure.
  The PSAP will report a trouble any time an address is not received
  on an address display (screen blank) E911 call. (If a record is not
  in the 911 data base or an ANI failure is encountered, the screen
  will provide a display noticing such condition). The SSC/MAC should
  verify with the PSAP whether the NO ALI condition is on one screen
  or all screens.
  When the condition is on one screen (other screens receive ALI
  information) the SSC/MAC will request SSIM/I&M to dispatch.
  If no screens are receiving ALI information, there is usually a
  circuit trouble between the PSAP and the Host computer. The SSC/MAC
  should test the trouble and refer for restoral.
      * Note: If the SSC/MAC receives calls from multiple PSAP's, all
        of which are receiving NO ALI, there is a problem with the      
        Node or Node to Host circuits or the Host computer itself.
        Before referring the trouble the SSC/MAC should call the MMOC
        to inquire if the Node or Host is in trouble.
  Alarm conditions on the ANI controller digital display at the PSAP
  are to be reported by the PSAP's. These alarms can indicate various
  trouble conditions so the SSC/MAC should ask the PSAP if any portion
  of the E911 system is not functioning properly.
  The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP attendant that the
  equipment's primary function is answering E911 calls. If it is, the
  SSC/MAC should request a dispatch SSIM/I&M. If the equipment is not
  primarily used for E911, then the SSC/MAC should advise PSAP to
  contact their CPE vendor.
      * Note: These troubles can be quite confusing when the PSAP has
        vendor equipment mixed in with equipment that the BOC
        maintains. The Marketing representative should provide the
        SSC/MAC information concerning any unusual or exception items
        where the PSAP should contact their vendor. This information
        should be included in the PSAP profile sheets.
  ANI or ALI controller down: When the host computer sees the PSAP
  equipment down and it does not come back up, the MMOC will report
  the trouble to the SSC/MAC; the equipment is down at the PSAP, a
  dispatch will be required.
  PSAP link (circuit) down: The MMOC will provide the SSC/MAC with the
  circuit ID that the Host computer indicates in trouble. Although
  each PSAP has two circuits, when either circuit is down the
  condition must be treated as an emergency since failure of the
  second circuit will cause the PSAP to be isolated.
  Any problems that the MMOC identifies from the Node location to the
  Host computer will be handled directly with the appropriate MMOC(s)/
  CCNC.
      * Note: The customer will call only when a problem is apparent
        to the PSAP. When only one circuit is down to the PSAP, the
        customer may not be aware there is a trouble, even though
        there is one link down, notification should appear on the PSAP
        screen. Troubles called into the SSC/MAC from the MMOC or
        other company employee should not be closed out by calling the
        PSAP since it may result in the customer responding that they
        do not have a trouble. These reports can only be closed out by
        receiving information that the trouble was fixed and by
        checking with the company employee that reported the trouble.
        The MMOC personnel will be able to verify that the trouble has
        cleared by reviewing a printout from the host.
  When the CRSAB receives a subscriber complaint (i.e., cannot dial
  911) the RSA should obtain as much information as possible while the
  customer is on the line.
  For example, what happened when the subscriber dialed 911? The
  report is automatically directed to the IMC for subscriber line
  testing. When no line trouble is found, the IMC will refer the
  trouble condition to the SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC will contact Customer
  Services E911 Group and verify that the subscriber should be able to
  call 911 and obtain the ESN. The SSC/MAC will verify the ESN via
  2SCCS. When both verifications match, the SSC/MAC will refer the
  report to the SCC responsible for the 911 tandem office for
  investigation and resolution. The MAC is responsible for tracking
  the trouble and informing the IMC when it is resolved.
  For more information, please refer to E911 Glossary of Terms.
       End of Phrack File

  The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read this
  document. John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense,
  in "Crime and Puzzlement:" "Bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity....
  To read the whole thing straight through without entering coma
  requires either a machine or a human who has too much practice
  thinking like one. Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly
  had altered his consciousness beyone the ability to ever again read
  Blake, Whitman, or Tolstoy.... the document contains little of
  interest to anyone who is not a student of advanced organizational
  sclerosis."
  With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was
  published (in its six-page edited form) in Phrack, the reader may be
  able to verify a few statements of fact about its nature. First,
  there is no software, no computer code, in the Document. It is not
  computer-programming language like FORTRAN or C++, it is English;
  all the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation. It does not
  explain how to break into the E911 system. It does not suggest ways
  to destroy or damage the E911 system.
  There are no access codes in the Document. There are no computer
  passwords. It does not explain how to steal long distance service.
  It does not explain how to break in to telco switching stations.
  There is nothing in it about using a personal computer or a modem
  for any purpose at all, good or bad.
  Close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery.
  The E911 Document is about administration. It describes how one
  creates and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy: Special
  Service Centers and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC). It describes
  how these centers should distribute responsibility for the E911
  service, to other units of telco bureaucracy, in a chain of command,
  a formal hierarchy. It describes who answers customer complaints,
  who screens calls, who reports equipment failures, who answers those
  reports, who handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who
  gives orders, who follows orders, who tells whom what to do. The
  Document is not a "roadmap" to computers. The Document is a roadmap
  to people.
  As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is
  useless. As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people, however,
  the Document might prove handy (especially with its Glossary, which
  I have not included). An intense and protracted study of this
  Document and its Glossary, combined with many other such documents,
  might teach one to speak like a telco employee. And telco people
  live by speech -- they live by phone communication. If you can mimic
  their language over the phone, you can "social-engineer" them. If
  you can con telco people, you can wreak havoc among them. You can
  force them to no longer trust one another; you can break the
  telephonic ties that bind their community; you can make them
  paranoid. And people will fight harder to defend their community
  than they will fight to defend their individual selves.
  This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by Phrack magazine. The
  real struggle was over the control of telco language, the control of
  telco knowledge. It was a struggle to defend the social "membrane of
  differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco community's ivory
  tower -- the special jargon that allows telco professionals to
  recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans, thieves, and
  upstarts. And the prosecution brought out this fact. They repeatedly
  made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals by hackers
  using "social engineering."
  However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like a
  professional telecommunications expert. Craig Neidorf was on trial
  for access device fraud and transportation of stolen property. He
  was on trial for stealing a document that was purportedly highly
  sensitive and purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars.

                                   3.
  John Nagle read the E911 Document. He drew his own conclusions. And
  he presented Zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box of
  similar material, drawn mostly from Stanford University's
  engineering libraries. During the trial, the defense team -- Zenner,
  half-a-dozen other attorneys, Nagle, Neidorf, and computer-security
  expert Dorothy Denning, all pored over the E911 Document line-by-
  line.
  On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-examine a
  woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for Southern Bell in
  Atlanta. Ms. Williams had been responsible for the E911 Document.
  (She was not its author -- its original "author" was a Southern Bell
  staff manager named Richard Helms. However, Mr. Helms should not
  bear the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance
  personnel had amended the Document. It had not been so much
  "written" by a single author, as built by committee out of concrete-
  blocks of jargon.)
  Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution, and
  had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure of the
  E911 system, aided by charts.
  Now it was Zenner's turn. He first established that the "proprietary
  stamp" that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document was stamped on
  every single document that BellSouth wrote -- thousands of
  documents. "We do not publish anything other than for our own
  company," Ms. Williams explained. "Any company document of this
  nature is considered proprietary." Nobody was in charge of singling
  out special high-security publications for special high-security
  protection. They were all special, no matter how trivial, no matter
  what their subject matter - - the stamp was put on as soon as any
  document was written, and the stamp was never removed.
  Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain
  the mechanics of E911 system were "proprietary," too. Were they
  public information, these charts, all about PSAPs, ALIs, nodes,
  local end switches? Could he take the charts out in the street and
  show them to anybody, "without violating some proprietary notion
  that BellSouth has?"
  Ms Williams showed some confusion, but finally agreed that the
  charts were, in fact, public.
  "But isn't this what you said was basically what appeared in
  Phrack?"
  Ms. Williams denied this.
  Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as published in Phrack
  was only half the size of the original E911 Document (as Prophet had
  purloined it). Half of it had been deleted -- edited by Neidorf.
  Ms. Williams countered that "Most of the information that is in the
  text file is redundant."
  Zenner continued to probe. Exactly what bits of knowledge in the
  Document were, in fact, unknown to the public? Locations of E911
  computers? Phone numbers for telco personnel? Ongoing maintenance
  subcommittees? Hadn't Neidorf removed much of this?
  Then he pounced. "Are you familiar with Bellcore Technical Reference
  Document TR-TSY-000350?" It was, Zenner explained, officially titled
  "E911 Public Safety Answering Point Interface Between 1-1AESS Switch
  and Customer Premises Equipment." It contained highly detailed and
  specific technical information about the E911 System. It was
  published by Bellcore and publicly available for about $20.
  He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed thousands of
  documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells, BellSouth
  included. The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free. Anyone with a
  credit card could call the Bellcore toll-free 800 number and simply
  order any of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer
  without question. Including, for instance, "BellSouth E911 Service
  Interfaces to Customer Premises Equipment at a Public Safety
  Answering Point."
  Zenner gave the witness a copy of "BellSouth E911 Service
  Interfaces," which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from the
  catalog. "Look at it carefully," he urged Ms. Williams, "and tell me
  if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed information about
  the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared anywhere in Phrack."
  "You want me to...." Ms. Williams trailed off. "I don't understand."
  "Take a careful look," Zenner persisted. "Take a look at that
  document, and tell me when you're done looking at it if, indeed, it
  doesn't contain much more detailed information about the E911 system
  than appeared in Phrack."
  "Phrack wasn't taken from this," Ms. Williams said.
  "Excuse me?" said Zenner.
  "Phrack wasn't taken from this."
  "I can't hear you," Zenner said.
  "Phrack was not taken from this document. I don't understand your
  question to me."
  "I guess you don't," Zenner said.
  At this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot. Ms. Williams
  was distressed. Her confusion was quite genuine. Phrack had not been
  taken from any publicly available Bellcore document. Phrack's E911
  Document had been stolen from her own company's computers, from her
  own company's text files, that her own colleagues had written, and
  revised, with much labor.
  But the "value" of the Document had been blown to smithereens. It
  wasn't worth eighty grand. According to Bellcore it was worth
  thirteen bucks. And the looming menace that it supposedly posed had
  been reduced in instants to a scarecrow. Bellcore itself was selling
  material far more detailed and "dangerous," to anybody with a credit
  card and a phone.
  Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody.
  They gave it to anybody who asked, but not many did ask. Not many
  people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog and an 800 number. John
  Nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn't know.
  "Tuc," a friend of Neidorf's and sometime Phrack contributor, knew,
  and Tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes. But
  the Legion of Doom didn't know -- otherwise, they would never have
  wasted so much time raiding dumpsters. Cook didn't know. Foley
  didn't know. Kluepfel didn't know. The right hand of Bellcore knew
  not what the left hand was doing. The right hand was battering
  hackers without mercy, while the left hand was distributing
  Bellcore's intellectual property to anybody who was interested in
  telephone technical trivia -- apparently, a pathetic few.
  The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized that
  they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches. The ivory
  tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog of its own
  technical obscurity that it had left all the windows open and flung
  open the doors. No one had even noticed.
  Zenner sank another nail in the coffin. He produced a printed issue
  of Telephone Engineer & Management, a prominent industry journal
  that comes out twice a month and costs $27 a year. This particular
  issue of TE&M, called "Update on 911," featured a galaxy of
  technical details on 911 service and a glossary far more extensive
  than Phrack's.
  The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum. Tim Foley
  testified about his interrogations of Neidorf. Neidorf's written
  admission that he had known the E911 Document was pilfered was
  officially read into the court record.
  An interesting side issue came up: "Terminus" had once passed
  Neidorf a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence, that had
  been cunningly altered so that it could trap passwords. The UNIX
  software itself was illegally copied AT&T property, and the
  alterations "Terminus" had made to it, had transformed it into a
  device for facilitating computer break-ins. Terminus himself would
  eventually plead guilty to theft of this piece of software, and the
  Chicago group would send Terminus to prison for it. But it was of
  dubious relevance in the Neidorf case. Neidorf hadn't written the
  program. He wasn't accused of ever having used it. And Neidorf
  wasn't being charged with software theft or owning a password
  trapper.
  On the next day, Zenner took the offensive. The civil libertarians
  now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into
  action -- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 US
  Code, Section 2701 et seq. Section 2701 makes it a crime to
  intentionally access without authorization a facility in which an
  electronic communication service is provided -- it is, at heart, an
  anti-bugging and anti-tapping law, intended to carry the traditional
  protections of telephones into other electronic channels of
  communication. While providing penalties for amateur snoops,
  however, Section 2703 of the ECPA also lays some formal difficulties
  on the bugging and tapping activities of police.
  The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had served Richard
  Andrews with a federal grand jury subpoena, in their pursuit of
  Prophet, the E911 Document, and the Terminus software ring. But
  according to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a "provider
  of remote computing service" was legally entitled to "prior notice"
  from the government if a subpoena was used. Richard Andrews and his
  basement UNIX node, Jolnet, had not received any "prior notice." Tim
  Foley had purportedly violated the ECPA and committed an electronic
  crime! Zenner now sought the judge's permission to cross-examine
  Foley on the topic of Foley's own electronic misdeeds.
  Cook argued that Richard Andrews' Jolnet was a privately owned
  bulletin board, and not within the purview of ECPA. Judge Bua
  granted the motion of the government to prevent cross-examination on
  that point, and Zenner's offensive fizzled. This, however, was the
  first direct assault on the legality of the actions of the Computer
  Fraud and Abuse Task Force itself -- the first suggestion that they
  themselves had broken the law, and might, perhaps, be called to
  account.
  Zenner, in any case, did not really need the ECPA. Instead, he
  grilled Foley on the glaring contradictions in the supposed value of
  the E911 Document. He also brought up the embarrassing fact that the
  supposedly red- hot E911 Document had been sitting around for
  months, in Jolnet, with Kluepfel's knowledge, while Kluepfel had
  done nothing about it.
  In the afternoon, the Prophet was brought in to testify for the
  prosecution. (The Prophet, it will be recalled, had also been
  indicted in the case as partner in a fraud scheme with Neidorf.) In
  Atlanta, the Prophet had already pled guilty to one charge of
  conspiracy, one charge of wire fraud and one charge of interstate
  transportation of stolen property. The wire fraud charge, and the
  stolen property charge, were both directly based on the E911
  Document.
  The twenty-year-old Prophet proved a sorry customer, answering
  questions politely but in a barely audible mumble, his voice
  trailing off at the ends of sentences. He was constantly urged to
  speak up.
  Cook, examining Prophet, forced him to admit that he had once had a
  "drug problem," abusing amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, and LSD.
  This may have established to the jury that "hackers" are, or can be,
  seedy lowlife characters, but it may have damaged Prophet's
  credibility somewhat. Zenner later suggested that drugs might have
  damaged Prophet's memory. The interesting fact also surfaced that
  Prophet had never physically met Craig Neidorf. He didn't even know
  Neidorf's last name -- at least, not until the trial.
  Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career. He was a
  member of the Legion of Doom. He had abused codes, he had broken
  into switching stations and re-routed calls, he had hung out on
  pirate bulletin boards. He had raided the BellSouth AIMSX computer,
  copied the E911 Document, stored it on Jolnet, mailed it to Neidorf.
  He and Neidorf had edited it, and Neidorf had known where it came
  from.
  Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not a member
  of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to break into
  BellSouth computers. Neidorf had never urged Prophet to defraud
  anyone, or to steal anything. Prophet also admitted that he had
  never known Neidorf to break in to any computer. Prophet said that
  no one in the Legion of Doom considered Craig Neidorf a "hacker" at
  all. Neidorf was not a UNIX maven, and simply lacked the necessary
  skill and ability to break into computers. Neidorf just published a
  magazine.
  On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf collapsed. Cook
  moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently
  available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the
  trial." Judge Bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he
  described as "very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared
  a mistrial.
  Neidorf was a free man. His defense, however, had cost himself and
  his family dearly. Months of his life had been consumed in anguish;
  he had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal. He
  owed his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite a generous
  payment to the defense by Mitch Kapor.
  Neidorf was not found innocent. The trial was simply dropped.
  Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted Neidorf's
  motion for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record.
  The United States Secret Service was ordered to delete and destroy
  all fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest or
  processing relating to Neidorf's indictment, including their paper
  documents and their computer records.
  Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a
  lawyer. Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf lost much of
  his enthusiasm for merely technical power. At this writing, Craig
  Neidorf is working in Washington as a salaried researcher for the
  American Civil Liberties Union.

                                   4.
  The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF from voices-in-the-
  wilderness to the media darlings of the new frontier.
  Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph for
  anyone concerned. No constitutional principles had been established.
  The issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers
  remained in legal limbo. There were public misconceptions about the
  case. Many people thought Neidorf had been found innocent and
  relieved of all his legal debts by Kapor. The truth was that the
  government had simply dropped the case, and Neidorf's family had
  gone deeply into hock to support him.
  But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public
  sound-bite: The feds said it was worth eighty grand, and it was only
  worth thirteen bucks.
  This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element. No serious
  report of the case missed this particular element. Even cops could
  not read this without a wince and a shake of the head. It left the
  public credibility of the crackdown agents in tatters.
  The crackdown, in fact, continued, however. Those two charges
  against Prophet, which had been based on the E911 Document, were
  quietly forgotten at his sentencing -- even though Prophet had
  already pled guilty to them. Georgia federal prosecutors strongly
  argued for jail time for the Atlanta Three, insisting on "the need
  to send a message to the community," "the message that hackers
  around the country need to hear."
  There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum about the
  awful things that various other hackers had done (though the Atlanta
  Three themselves had not, in fact, actually committed these crimes).
  There was also much speculation about the awful things that the
  Atlanta Three might have done and were capable of doing (even though
  they had not, in fact, actually done them). The prosecution's
  argument carried the day. The Atlanta Three were sent to prison:
  Urvile and Leftist both got 14 months each, while Prophet (a second
  offender) got 21 months.
  The Atlanta Three were also assessed staggering fines as
  "restitution": $233,000 each. BellSouth claimed that the defendants
  had "stolen" "approximately $233,880 worth" of "proprietary computer
  access information" -- specifically, $233,880 worth of computer
  passwords and connect addresses. BellSouth's astonishing claim of
  the extreme value of its own computer passwords and addresses was
  accepted at face value by the Georgia court. Furthermore (as if to
  emphasize its theoretical nature) this enormous sum was not divvied
  up among the Atlanta Three, but each of them had to pay all of it.
  A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta Three were
  specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under
  supervision. Depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes
  some sense if one considers hackers as "computer addicts," but EFF,
  filing an amicus brief in the case, protested that this punishment
  was unconstitutional -- it deprived the Atlanta Three of their
  rights of free association and free expression through electronic
  media.
  Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a
  year through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task Force. His
  crime, to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the UNIX
  password trapper, which was officially valued by AT&T at $77,000, a
  figure which aroused intense skepticism among those familiar with
  UNIX "login.c" programs.
  The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of Doom,
  however, did not cause the EFF any sense of embarrassment or defeat.
  On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering
  strength.
  An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat
  from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor of the Electronic
  Communications Privacy Act. Even before the Neidorf trial, Leahy had
  spoken out in defense of hacker-power and freedom of the keyboard:
  "We cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive 13-year-old who, if left
  to experiment today, may tomorrow develop the telecommunications or
  computer technology to lead the United States into the 21st century.
  He represents our future and our best hope to remain a
  technologically competitive nation."
  It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective
  by the fact that the crackdown raiders did not have any Senators
  speaking out for them. On the contrary, their highly secretive
  actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and
  "confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won them a
  burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling them in
  the on-going propaganda war. Gail Thackeray was reduced to
  unsupported bluster: "Some of these people who are loudest on the
  bandwagon may just slink into the background," she predicted in
  Newsweek - - when all the facts came out, and the cops were
  vindicated.
  But all the facts did not come out. Those facts that did, were not
  very flattering. And the cops were not vindicated. And Gail
  Thackeray lost her job. By the end of 1991, William Cook had also
  left public employment.
  1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents were in
  severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll. People were
  flocking to the cause.
  A particularly interesting ally had been Mike Godwin of Austin,
  Texas. Godwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as
  Barlow; he had been editor of the student newspaper of the
  University of Texas, and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and
  in 1990 was back in law school, looking for a law degree.
  Godwin was also a bulletin board maven. He was very well-known in
  the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny Mnemonic," which
  he adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by William Gibson.
  Godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan. As a fellow
  Austinite of similar age and similar interests, I myself had known
  Godwin socially for many years. When William Gibson and myself had
  been writing our collaborative SF novel, The Difference Engine,
  Godwin had been our technical advisor in our effort to link our
  Apple word-processors from Austin to Vancouver. Gibson and I were so
  pleased by his generous expert help that we named a character in the
  novel "Michael Godwin" in his honor.
  The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well. His erudition and his
  mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor; his ardent
  curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate and argue
  seemed the central drive of his life. Godwin had even started his
  own Austin debating society, wryly known as the "Dull Men's Club."
  In person, Godwin could be overwhelming; a flypaper- brained
  polymath who could not seem to let any idea go. On bulletin boards,
  however, Godwin's closely reasoned, highly grammatical, erudite
  posts suited the medium well, and he became a local board celebrity.
  Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public national
  exposure of the Steve Jackson case. The Izenberg seizure in Austin
  had received no press coverage at all. The March 1 raids on Mentor,
  Bloodaxe, and Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page
  splash in the front page of the Austin American-Statesman, but it
  was confused and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the
  Secret Service wasn't talking. Steve Jackson seemed doomed to
  obscurity. Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with
  any crime; he was not on trial. He had lost some computers in an
  ongoing investigation -- so what? Jackson tried hard to attract
  attention to the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a
  blank; no one in a position to help him seemed able to get a mental
  grip on the issues.
  Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified to carry
  Jackson's case to the outside world. Godwin was a board enthusiast,
  a science fiction fan, a former journalist, a computer salesman, a
  lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite. Through a coincidence yet more
  amazing, in his last year of law school Godwin had specialized in
  federal prosecutions and criminal procedure. Acting entirely on his
  own, Godwin made up a press packet which summarized the issues and
  provided useful contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes
  effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local
  board debate) broke the story again in the Austin American-Statesman
  and then in Newsweek.
  Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that. As he joined the
  growing civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to
  all parties involved that here was one guy who, in the midst of
  complete murk and confusion, genuinely understood everything he was
  talking about. The disparate elements of Godwin's dilettantish
  existence suddenly fell together as neatly as the facets of a
  Rubik's cube.
  When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney, Godwin
  was the obvious choice. He took the Texas bar exam, left Austin,
  moved to Cambridge, became a full-time, professional, computer civil
  libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of EFF,
  delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds as
  disparate as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans, and
  federal cops.
  Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of the
  Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

                                   5.
  Another early and influential participant in the controversy was
  Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was unique among investigators of the
  computer underground in that she did not enter the debate with any
  set of politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer and
  computer security expert whose primary interest in hackers was
  scholarly. She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in
  computer science from Purdue. She had worked for SRI International,
  the California think-tank that was also the home of computer-
  security maven Donn Parker, and had authored an influential text
  called Cryptography and Data Security. In 1990, Dr. Denning was
  working for Digital Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach
  Center. Her husband, Peter Denning, was also a computer security
  expert, working for NASA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer
  Science. He had edited the well- received Computers Under Attack:
  Intruders, Worms and Viruses.
  Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground,
  more or less with an anthropological interest. There she discovered
  that these computer- intruding hackers, who had been characterized
  as unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society, did in
  fact have their own subculture and their own rules. They were not
  particularly well-considered rules, but they were, in fact, rules.
  Basically, they didn't take money and they didn't break anything.
  Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal to
  influence serious-minded computer professionals -- the sort of
  people who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of
  a John Perry Barlow.
  For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy
  Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this
  neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who
  reminded most hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was
  an IBM systems programmer with profound expertise in computer
  architectures and high-security information flow, who had personal
  friends in the FBI and the National Security Agency.
  Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American mathematical
  intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks
  of the computer- science elite. And here she was, gently questioning
  twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical
  implications of their behavior.
  Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very
  straight and did their best to keep the anarchy- file stuff down to
  a faint whiff of brimstone. Nevertheless, the hackers were in fact
  prepared to seriously discuss serious issues with Dorothy Denning.
  They were willing to speak the unspeakable and defend the
  indefensible, to blurt out their convictions that information cannot
  be owned, that the databases of governments and large corporations
  were a threat to the rights and privacy of individuals.
  Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking" was not
  simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics. "Hacking" was
  not an aberrant menace that could be charmed away by ignoring it, or
  swept out of existence by jailing a few ringleaders. Instead,
  "hacking" was symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over
  knowledge and power in the age of information.
  Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least
  partially shared by forward-looking management theorists in the
  business community: people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter
  Drucker, in his book The New Realities, had stated that "control of
  information by the government is no longer possible. Indeed,
  information is now transnational. Like money, it has no
  'fatherland.'"
  And management maven Tom Peters had chided large corporations for
  uptight, proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, Thriving on Chaos:
  "Information hoarding, especially by politically motivated, power-
  seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout American industry,
  service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible millstone
  aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."
  Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membrane of the digital
  underground. She attended the Neidorf trial, where she was prepared
  to testify for the defense as an expert witness. She was a behind-
  the- scenes organizer of two of the most important national meetings
  of the computer civil libertarians. Though not a zealot of any
  description, she brought disparate elements of the electronic
  community into a surprising and fruitful collusion.
  Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the Computer Science
  Department at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

                                   6.
  There were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian community.
  There's no question, however, that its single most influential
  figure was Mitchell D. Kapor. Other people might have formal titles,
  or governmental positions, have more experience with crime, or with
  the law, or with the arcanities of computer security or
  constitutional theory. But by 1991 Kapor had transcended any such
  narrow role. Kapor had become "Mitch."
  Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad- hocrat. Mitch had
  stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly, vigorously and
  angrily, he had put his own reputation, and his very considerable
  personal fortune, on the line. By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known
  advocate of his cause and was known personally by almost every
  single human being in America with any direct influence on the
  question of civil liberties in cyberspace. Mitch had built bridges,
  crossed voids, changed paradigms, forged metaphors, made phone-calls
  and swapped business cards to such spectacular effect that it had
  become impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker
  question" without wondering what Mitch might think -- and say -- and
  tell his friends.
  The EFF had simply networked the situation into an entirely new
  status quo. And in fact this had been EFF's deliberate strategy from
  the beginning. Both Barlow and Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had
  deliberately chosen to work almost entirely through the electronic
  spiderweb of "valuable personal contacts."
  After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every reason to look
  back with satisfaction. EFF had established its own Internet node,
  "eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic archive of documents on
  electronic civil rights, privacy issues, and academic freedom. EFF
  was also publishing EFFector, a quarterly printed journal, as well
  as EFFector Online, an electronic newsletter with over 1,200
  subscribers. And EFF was thriving on the Well.
  EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-time staff.
  It had become a membership organization and was attracting grass-
  roots support. It had also attracted the support of some thirty
  civil-rights lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense
  of the Constitution in Cyberspace.
  EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in Massachusetts to
  change state and federal legislation on computer networking. Kapor
  in particular had become a veteran expert witness, and had joined
  the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National
  Academy of Science and Engineering.
  EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
  and the CPSR Roundtable. It had carried out a press offensive that,
  in the words of EFFector, "has affected the climate of opinion about
  computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into 'hacker
  hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."
  It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.
  And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic Frontier
  Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of Steve Jackson,
  Steve Jackson Games Inc., and three users of the Illuminati bulletin
  board system. The defendants were, and are, the United States Secret
  Service, William Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.
  The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin federal
  court as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress
  alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments to the United
  States Constitution, as well as the Privacy Protection Act of 1980
  (42 USC 2000aa et seq.), and the Electronic Communications Privacy
  Act (18 USC 2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).
  EFF had established that it had credibility. It had also established
  that it had teeth.
  In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak personally
  with Mitch Kapor. It was my final interview for this book.

                                   7.
  The city of Boston has always been one of the major intellectual
  centers of the American republic. It is a very old city by American
  standards, a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century
  graveyards, where the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-
  exist with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old Ironsides,"
  the USS Constitution.
  The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest armed
  clashes of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's environs.
  Today there is a monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout
  much of the city. The willingness of the republican revolutionaries
  to take up arms and fire on their oppressors has left a cultural
  legacy that two full centuries have not effaced. Bunker Hill is
  still a potent center of American political symbolism, and the
  Spirit of '76 is still a potent image for those who seek to mold
  public opinion.
  Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily
  a patriot. When I visited the spire in September 1991, it bore a
  huge, badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading
  "BRITS OUT -- IRA PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-
  cased diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and
  redcoats, fighting and dying over the green hill, the riverside
  marshes, the rebel trenchworks. Plaques indicated the movement of
  troops, the shiftings of strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument is
  occupied at its very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-
  game simulation.
  The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities, prominent
  among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the term
  "computer hacker" was first coined. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990
  might be interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:
  traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism, such as
  Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the bare-knuckle
  industrial pragmatism of Chicago and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New
  York wrapped in internal struggle).
  The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on 155
  Second Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north of the River
  Charles. Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick
  and elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "NO PARKING
  DURING DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY." This is an old area of modest
  manufacturing industries; the EFF is catecorner from the Greene
  Rubber Company. EFF's building is two stories of red brick; its
  large wooden windows feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills.
  The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears three
  sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass. They
  read: ON Technology. EFF. KEI.
  "ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which currently
  specializes in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh computer.
  "Groupware" is intended to promote efficient social interaction
  among office-workers linked by computers. ON Technology's most
  successful software products to date are "Meeting Maker" and
  "Instant Update."
  "KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal holding company,
  the commercial entity that formally controls his extensive
  investments in other hardware and software corporations.
  "EFF" is a political action group -- of a special sort.
  Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails of a modest
  flight of stairs. A wall of modish glass brick separates this
  anteroom from the offices. Beyond the brick, there's an alarm system
  mounted on the wall, a sleek, complex little number that resembles a
  cross between a thermostat and a CD player. Piled against the wall
  are box after box of a recent special issue of Scientific American,
  "How to Work, Play, and Thrive in Cyberspace," with extensive
  coverage of electronic networking techniques and political issues,
  including an article by Kapor himself. These boxes are addressed to
  Gerard Van der Leun, EFF's Director of Communications, who will
  shortly mail those magazines to every member of the EFF.
  The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON Technology, which Kapor
  currently rents, is a modestly bustling place. It's very much the
  same physical size as Steve Jackson's gaming company. It's certainly
  a far cry from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway shipping barn,
  on the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned by Lotus Development
  Corporation.
  Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell Kapor founded
  in the late 70s. The software program Kapor co-authored, "Lotus 1-2-
  3," is still that company's most profitable product. "Lotus 1-2-3"
  also bears a singular distinction in the digital underground: it's
  probably the most pirated piece of application software in world
  history.
  Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall. Kapor,
  whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his early forties, married
  and the father of two. He has a round face, high forehead, straight
  nose, a slightly tousled mop of black hair peppered with gray. His
  large brown eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say
  soulful. He disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts and
  tropical prints, not so much garish as simply cheerful and just that
  little bit anomalous.
  There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch Kapor. He
  may not have the hard-riding, hell-for- leather, guitar-strumming
  charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's
  something about the guy that still stops one short. He has the air
  of the Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy, Longfellow-
  quoting poker shark who only happens to know the exact mathematical
  odds against drawing to an inside straight. Even among his computer-
  community colleagues, who are hardly known for mental sluggishness,
  Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very intelligent man. He speaks
  rapidly, with vigorous gestures, his Boston accent sometimes
  slipping to the sharp nasal tang of his youth in Long Island.
  Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much of his philanthropic
  work, is a strong supporter of Boston's Computer Museum. Kapor's
  interest in the history of his industry has brought him some
  remarkable curios, such as the "byte" just outside his office door.
  This "byte" -- eight digital bits -- has been salvaged from the
  wreck of an electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. It's a
  standing gunmetal rack about the size of a small toaster- oven: with
  eight slots of hand-soldered breadboarding featuring thumb-sized
  vacuum tubes. If it fell off a table it could easily break your
  foot, but it was state-of-the-art computation in the 1940s. (It
  would take exactly 157,184 of these primordial toasters to hold the
  first part of this book.)
  There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that some
  inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of
  transistors, capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring.
  Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little
  mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh IIfx. If its
  giant screen were an open window, an agile person could climb
  through it without much trouble at all. There's a coffee-cup at
  Kapor's elbow, a memento of his recent trip to Eastern Europe, which
  has a black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend CAPITALIST
  FOOLS TOUR. It's Kapor, Barlow, and two California venture-
  capitalist luminaries of their acquaintance, four windblown,
  grinning Baby Boomer dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel
  bags, standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the formerly Iron
  Curtain. They look as if they're having the absolute time of their
  lives.
  Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about his youth -
  - high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays attending Columbia
  University's high-school science honors program, where he had his
  first experience programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66.
  "I was very interested," says Kapor, "and then I went off to college
  and got distracted by drugs sex and rock and roll, like anybody with
  half a brain would have then!" After college he was a progressive-
  rock DJ in Hartford, Connecticut, for a couple of years.
  I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days -- if he ever
  wished he could go back to radio work.
  He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about going back to
  be a DJ the day after Altamont."
  Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes
  in COBOL. He hated it. He quit and became a teacher of
  transcendental meditation. (It was Kapor's long flirtation with
  Eastern mysticism that gave the world "Lotus.")
  In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental
  Meditation movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-
  Moritz. It was an all-male group -- a hundred and twenty of them -
  - determined upon Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the
  transcendant his best shot. He was becoming disenchanted by "the
  nuttiness in the organization." "They were teaching people to
  levitate," he says, staring at the floor. His voice drops an octave,
  becomes flat. "They don't levitate."
  Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and acquired a degree
  in counselling psychology. He worked a while in a hospital, couldn't
  stand that either. "My rep was," he says "a very bright kid with a
  lot of potential who hasn't found himself. Almost thirty. Sort of
  lost."
  Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer -
  - an Apple II. He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New
  Hampshire to avoid the sales tax.
  "The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out
  in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties,
  well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the
  salesman. He didn't know anything about computers. I'd had a year
  programming. And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I
  went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant."
  He pauses. "I don't know where I got the nerve to do this. It was
  uncharacteristic. I just said, 'I think I can help you, I've been
  listening, this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for
  you.' And he took me on! He was my first client! I became a computer
  consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."
  Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted more clients for his
  consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.
  A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT, had
  a problem. He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of financial
  statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue for
  time on MIT's mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr.
  Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes, Kapor
  himself might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business
  might have been set back for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an
  Apple II, however, and he thought it might be possible to scale the
  problem down. Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that
  did the job.
  It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue, that it might
  be possible to sell this program. They marketed it themselves, in
  plastic baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "This
  was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant," Kapor says
  proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to God."
  Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street,
  urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA. Kapor did
  seven months there, but never got his MBA. He picked up some useful
  tools -- mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting -- and,
  in his own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he dropped out and
  went to Silicon Valley.
  The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business
  program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked
  diligently for them for six months, got tired of California, and
  went back to Boston where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc
  group had made the critical error of bringing in "professional
  management." "That drove them into the ground," Kapor says.
  "Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.
  Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus.... we bought it."
  "Oh. You bought it?"
  "Yeah."
  "Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"
  Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"
  Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his
  industry. The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s were
  computer games -- the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage
  home in America. Kapor got into business software simply because he
  didn't have any particular feeling for computer games. But he was
  supremely fast on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust
  his instincts. And his instincts were good. He chose good people to
  deal with -- gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of
  Lotus 1-2-3). Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street
  analyst and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor was the founder and
  CEO of Lotus, one of the most spectacularly successful business
  ventures of the later twentieth century.
  He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he actually knows
  how much money he has.
  "Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."
  How much does he actually have, then?
  He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I talk about.
  Issues of money and class are things that cut pretty close to the
  bone."
  I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might presume, impolitely,
  that Kapor has at least forty million - - that's what he got the
  year he left Lotus. People who ought to know claim Kapor has about a
  hundred and fifty million, give or take a market swing in his stock
  holdings. If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and
  rival Bill Gates has stuck with his own software start-up,
  Microsoft, then Kapor would likely have much the same fortune Gates
  has -- somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion, give or take
  a few hundred million. Mitch Kapor has all the money he wants. Money
  has lost whatever charm it ever held for him -- probably not much in
  the first place. When Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic,
  too far from the true sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked.
  He simply severed all connections with the company and went out the
  door. It stunned everyone -- except those who knew him best.
  Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough
  transformation in cyberspace politics. In its first year, EFF's
  budget was about a quarter of a million dollars. Kapor is running
  EFF out of his pocket change.
  Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself a
  civil libertarian per se. He has spent quite some time with true-
  blue civil libertarians lately, and there's a political-correctness
  to them that bugs him. They seem to him to spend entirely too much
  time in legal nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil
  rights in the everyday real world.
  Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he prefers his
  involvements direct, personal, and hands-on. "The fact that EFF has
  a node on the Internet is a great thing. We're a publisher. We're a
  distributor of information." Among the items the eff.org Internet
  node carries is back issues of Phrack. They had an internal debate
  about that in EFF, and finally decided to take the plunge. They
  might carry other digital underground publications -- but if they
  do, he says, "we'll certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail
  Thackeray wants to put up. We'll turn it into a public library, that
  has the whole spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people
  making up their own minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the
  editorials."
  Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet in
  the service of the public interest. "The problem with being a node
  on the Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical
  specialist. We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of
  the balky beast! We couldn't do it ourselves!"
  He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has to evolve is
  much more standardized units, that a non- technical person can feel
  comfortable with. It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs.
  I can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net.
  Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now
  have. It's possible. We're working actively."
  Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his
  material. "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone
  should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing
  they're going to say is, 'IP doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface
  protocol for the Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software
  is simply not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of
  usable addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is:
  evolve the protocol! Get the smart people together and figure out
  what to do. Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol? Don't just say, we
  can't do it."
  Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill at
  which Kapor clearly excels. I counter that people on the Internet
  rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem
  particularly anxious to democratize the Net.
  Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that this is the
  snobbery of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at
  the people who came over on the second boat! Just because they got
  here a year, or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that
  doesn't give them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"
  I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too, and they
  seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.
  Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are entirely
  different animals. "The Internet is an open system, everything is
  published, everything gets argued about, basically by anybody who
  can get in. Mostly, it's exclusive and elitist just because it's so
  difficult. Let's make it easier to use."
  On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis, the
  so-called elitists do have a point as well. "Before people start
  coming in, who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize
  the Net as 'all screwed up'.... They should at least take the time
  to understand the culture on its own terms. It has its own history -
  - show some respect for it. I'm a conservative, to that extent."
  The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of
  telecommunications. The Internet is decentralized, non-
  heirarchical, almost anarchic. There are no bosses, no chain of
  command, no secret data. If each node obeys the general interface
  standards, there's simply no need for any central network authority.
  Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an institution? I ask.
  That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment. "Their big advantage,
  that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring. But two
  things are happening. Anyone with right-of-way is putting down fiber
  -- Southern Pacific Railroad, people like that -- there's enormous
  'dark fiber' laid in." ("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose
  enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current usage that much
  of the fiber still has no light-signals on it - - it's still 'dark,'
  awaiting future use.)
  "The other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff is going
  to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV companies to
  AT&T wants to put in these things called 'personal communication
  systems.' So you could have local competition -- you could have
  multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up
  on poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber. So what
  happens to the telephone companies? There's enormous pressure on
  them from both sides.
  "The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a post-
  industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is bad.
  People will look back on it and say that in the 19th and 20th
  centuries the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise. You
  needed one set of wires in the ground. It was too economically
  inefficient, otherwise. And that meant one entity running it. But
  now, with pieces being wireless -- the connections are going to be
  via high- level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, ultimately there
  are going to be wires -- but the wires are just a commodity. Fiber,
  wireless. You no longer need a utility."
  Water utilities? Gas utilities?
  Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when what you're
  moving is information, instead of physical substances, then you can
  play by a different set of rules. We're evolving those rules now!
  Hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system, and one in
  which there's more competition in the marketplace.
  "The role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats. The
  proverbial 'level playing field.' A policy that prevents
  monopolization. It should result in better service, lower prices,
  more choices, and local empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on
  local empowerment."
  Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision which he and
  his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great
  energy. Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid
  considering some of the darker implications of "decentralized,
  nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking.
  I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking
  -- faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers -- played a strong role
  in dissolving the power of centralized communism and causing the
  collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
  Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from the
  Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves, is
  rather wishful thinking.
  Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode
  America's industrial and political infrastructure to the point where
  the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable -- and the old order
  just collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?
  "No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's extraordinarily unlikely.
  In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes about
  personal computers -- which utterly failed to materialize." He grins
  wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I'm very opposed to techno-utopias.
  Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."
  It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to make the world
  safe for democracy. He certainly is not trying to make it safe for
  anarchists or utopians -- least of all for computer intruders or
  electronic rip-off artists. What he really hopes to do is make the
  world safe for future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized,
  small- scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and
  brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic
  capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.
  Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary
  intensity with a strong practical streak. The Board of the EFF: John
  Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve
  Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West computer
  entrepreneurism -- share his gift, his vision, and his formidable
  networking talents. They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by
  its turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some
  of the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to
  offer. But can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only
  dreaming? They are so few. And there is so much against them.
  I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully
  with the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh
  System 7 software. The next day is Saturday. EFF is closed. I pay a
  few visits to points of interest downtown.
  One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.
  It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black- and-white
  speckled granite. It sits in the plaza of the John F. Kennedy
  Federal Building, the very place where Kapor was once fingerprinted
  by the FBI.
  The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original telephone.
  "BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875,
  Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound
  over wires.
  "This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at
  what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of world-
  wide telephone service."
  109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's plaque, across
  a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX, the local Bell
  RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.
  I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly, hands in
  my jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New England autumn day. The
  central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco,
  eight stories high.
  Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck. The generator
  strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they already have their own
  generators in this eight-story monster? Then the suspicion strikes
  me that NYNEX must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage
  which crashed New York City. Belt-and-suspenders, this generator.
  Very telco.
  Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze bas-
  relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining the Bell
  logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY -
  - an entity which no longer officially exists.
  The doors are locked securely. I peer through the shadowed glass.
  Inside is an official poster reading:
  ********** NNeeww EEnnggllaanndd TTeelleepphhoonnee aa NNYYNNEEXX CCoommppaannyy **********
  ********** AATTTTEENNTTIIOONN **********
  All persons while on New England Telephone Company premises are
  required to visibly wear their identification cards (C.C.P. Section
  2, Page 1).
  Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are required to
  visibly wear a daily pass.
      * Thank you.
       Kevin C. Stanton. Building Security Coordinator.
  Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal security
  door, a locked delivery entrance. Some passing stranger has
  grafitti-tagged this door, with a single word in red spray-painted
  cursive:
  Fury

                                   8.
  My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over now. I have
  deliberately saved the best for last.
  In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy Roundtable, in
  Washington, DC. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social
  Responsibility, was a sister organization of EFF, or perhaps its
  aunt, being older and perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the
  world of politics.
  Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility began in 1981 in
  Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group of Californian computer
  scientists and technicians, united by nothing more than an
  electronic mailing list. This typical high-tech ad-hocracy received
  the dignity of its own acronym in 1982, and was formally
  incorporated in 1983.
  CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an educational
  outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish and unthinking
  trust in complex computer systems. CPSR insisted that mere computers
  should never be considered a magic panacea for humanity's social,
  ethical or political problems. CPSR members were especially troubled
  about the stability, safety, and dependability of military computer
  systems, and very especially troubled by those systems controlling
  nuclear arsenals. CPSR was best-known for its persistent and well-
  publicized attacks on the scientific credibility of the Strategic
  Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").
  In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political activist
  group, with over two thousand members in twenty- one local chapters
  across the US. It was especially active in Boston, Silicon Valley,
  and Washington DC, where its Washington office sponsored the Public
  Policy Roundtable.
  The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which had passed
  CPSR an extensive grant for operations. This was the first large-
  scale, official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil
  libertarian community.
  Sixty people attended, myself included -- in this instance, not so
  much as a journalist as a cyberpunk author. Many of the luminaries
  of the field took part: Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course.
  Richard Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the
  ACLU. John Quarterman, author of The Matrix. Steven Levy, author of
  Hackers. George Perry and Sandy Weiss of Prodigy Services, there to
  network about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial
  network was experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo,
  manager of the Well. Steve Jackson was there, having finally found
  his ideal target audience, and so was Craig Neidorf, "Knight
  Lightning" himself, with his attorney, Sheldon Zenner. Katie Hafner,
  science journalist, and co- author of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers
  on the Computer Frontier. Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and fabled
  Internet guru. Janlori Goldman of the ACLU's Project on Privacy and
  Technology. John Nagle of Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the
  House Judiciary Committee. Tom Guidoboni, the defense attorney in
  the Internet Worm case. Lance Hoffman, computer-science professor at
  The George Washington University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host
  of others no less distinguished.
  Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address, expressing his
  determination to keep ahead of the curve on the issue of electronic
  free speech. The address was well-received, and the sense of
  excitement was palpable. Every panel discussion was interesting -
  - some were entirely compelling. People networked with an almost
  frantic interest.
  I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with
  Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a former director of
  the National Security Agency. As this was the first known encounter
  between an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of
  America's largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat,
  there was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.
  Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In fact all the
  discussions at the CPSR were officially off- the- record, the idea
  being to do some serious networking in an atmosphere of complete
  frankness, rather than to stage a media circus.
  In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting and intensely
  valuable, was as nothing compared to the truly mind-boggling event
  that transpired a mere month later.

                                   9.
  "Computers, Freedom and Privacy." Four hundred people from every
  conceivable corner of America's electronic community. As a science
  fiction writer, I have been to some weird gigs in my day, but this
  thing is truly beyond the pale. Even "Cyberthon," Point Foundation's
  "Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area psychedelia collided
  headlong with the emergent world of computerized virtual reality,
  was like a Kiwanis Club gig compared to this astonishing do.
  The "electronic community" had reached an apogee. Almost every
  principal in this book is in attendance. Civil Libertarians.
  Computer Cops. The Digital Underground. Even a few discreet telco
  people. Colorcoded dots for lapel tags are distributed. Free
  Expression issues. Law Enforcement. Computer Security. Privacy.
  Journalists. Lawyers. Educators. Librarians. Programmers. Stylish
  punk-black dots for the hackers and phone phreaks. Almost everyone
  here seems to wear eight or nine dots, to have six or seven
  professional hats.
  It is a community. Something like Lebanon perhaps, but a digital
  nation. People who had feuded all year in the national press, people
  who entertained the deepest suspicions of one another's motives and
  ethics, are now in each others' laps. "Computers, Freedom and
  Privacy" had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except
  for small irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the convention's
  token lunatic, a surprising bonhomie reigned. CFP was like a
  wedding-party in which two lovers, unstable bride and charlatan
  groom, tie the knot in a clearly disastrous matrimony.
  It is clear to both families -- even to neighbors and random guests
  -- that this is not a workable relationship, and yet the young
  couple's desperate attraction can brook no further delay. They
  simply cannot help themselves. Crockery will fly, shrieks from their
  newlywed home will wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings
  like a vulture over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and
  there is going to be a child from it. Tragedies end in death;
  comedies in marriage. The Hacker Crackdown is ending in marriage.
  And there will be a child.
  From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry Barlow, cyberspace
  ranger, is here. His color photo in The New York Times Magazine,
  Barlow scowling in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat,
  dark hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost and an awesome
  frontier rifle tucked under one arm, will be the single most
  striking visual image of the Hacker Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest
  of honor -- along with Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do
  they expect these dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?
  Barlow delivers the first address. Uncharacteristically, he is
  hoarse -- the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down. He speaks
  briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his
  leave to a storm of applause.
  Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly nervous. She's
  been on the Well a lot lately. Reading those Barlow posts. Following
  Barlow is a challenge to anyone. In honor of the famous lyricist for
  the Grateful Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read -- a
  poem. A poem she has composed herself.
  It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of Robert W.
  Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee, but it is in fact, a poem.
  It's the Ballad of the Electronic Frontier! A poem about the Hacker
  Crackdown and the sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes.
  The score or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a
  nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is the
  funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. The hackers and civil-
  libs, who had this woman figured for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are
  staring with their jaws hanging loosely. Never in the wildest
  reaches of their imagination had they figured Gail Thackeray was
  capable of such a totally off-the-wall move. You can see them
  punching their mental CONTROL-RESET buttons. Jesus! This woman's a
  hacker weirdo! She's just like us! God, this changes everything!
  Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the only cop at
  the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by Dorothy
  Denning. He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable; a "lion
  thrown to the Christians."
  At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes eloquent
  and even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital
  catalog of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird
  hybrid of George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes an
  arcane joke about statistical analysis. At least a third of the
  crowd laughs aloud.
  "They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse observes. He
  had been addressing cops -- straight cops, not computer people. It
  had been a worthy meeting, useful one supposes, but nothing like
  this. There has never been anything like this. Without any prodding,
  without any preparation, people in the audience simply begin to ask
  questions. Longhairs, freaky people, mathematicians. Bayse is
  answering, politely, frankly, fully, like a man walking on air. The
  ballroom's atmosphere crackles with surreality. A female lawyer
  behind me breaks into a sweat and a hot waft of surprisingly potent
  and musky perfume flows off her pulse-points.
  People are giddy with laughter. People are interested, fascinated,
  their eyes so wide and dark that they seem eroticized. Unlikely
  daisy-chains form in the halls, around the bar, on the escalators:
  cops with hackers, civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone
  phreaks.
  Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater with a
  tiny Secret Service logo. "I found Phiber Optik at the payphones,
  and when he saw my sweater, he turned into a pillar of salt!" she
  chortles.
  Phiber discusses his case at much length with his arresting officer,
  Don Delaney of the New York State Police. After an hour's chat, the
  two of them look ready to begin singing "Auld Lang Syne." Phiber
  finally finds the courage to get his worst complaint off his chest.
  It isn't so much the arrest. It was the charge. Pirating service off
  900 numbers. I'm a programmer, Phiber insists. This lame charge is
  going to hurt my reputation. It would have been cool to be busted
  for something happening, like Section 1030 computer intrusion. Maybe
  some kind of crime that's scarcely been invented yet. Not lousy
  phone fraud. Phooey.
  Delaney seems regretful. He had a mountain of possible criminal
  charges against Phiber Optik. The kid's gonna plead guilty anyway.
  He's a first timer, they always plead. Coulda charged the kid with
  most anything, and gotten the same result in the end. Delaney seems
  genuinely sorry not to have gratified Phiber in this harmless
  fashion. Too late now. Phiber's pled already. All water under the
  bridge. Whaddya gonna do?
  Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality. He held a press
  conference after he busted a bunch of Masters of Deception kids.
  Some journo had asked him: "Would you describe these people as
  geniuses?" Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "No, I would describe
  these people as defendants." Delaney busts a kid for hacking codes
  with repeated random dialling. Tells the press that NYNEX can track
  this stuff in no time flat nowadays, and a kid has to be stupid to
  do something so easy to catch. Dead on again: hackers don't mind
  being thought of as Genghis Khan by the straights, but if there's
  anything that really gets 'em where they live, it's being called
  dumb.
  Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around. As a second
  offender he's gonna see prison. Hackers break the law. They're not
  geniuses, either. They're gonna be defendants. And yet, Delaney
  muses over a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to
  treat them as common criminals. Delaney knows criminals. These kids,
  by comparison, are clueless -- there is just no crook vibe off of
  them, they don't smell right, they're just not bad.
  Delaney has seen a lot of action. He did Vietnam. He's been shot at,
  he has shot people. He's a homicide cop from New York. He has the
  appearance of a man who has not only seen the shit hit the fan but
  has seen it splattered across whole city blocks and left to ferment
  for years. This guy has been around.
  He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story. The dreamy game
  strategist has been dealt a bad hand. He has played it for all he is
  worth. Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior is a core of iron. Friends
  of his say Steve Jackson believes in the rules, believes in fair
  play. He will never compromise his principles, never give up.
  "Steve," Delaney says to Steve Jackson, "they had some balls,
  whoever busted you. You're all right!" Jackson, stunned, falls
  silent and actually blushes with pleasure.
  Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. The kid is a quick
  study, you gotta give him that. Dressed by his mom, the fashion
  manager for a national clothing chain, Missouri college techie-frat
  Craig Neidorf out-dappers everyone at this gig but the toniest East
  Coast lawyers. The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and
  now law school beckons for Neidorf. He looks like a larval
  Congressman.
  Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf. He's not interested in computer
  science. Why should he be? He's not interested in writing C code the
  rest of his life, and besides, he's seen where the chips fall. To
  the world of computer science he and Phrack were just a curiosity.
  But to the world of law.... The kid has learned where the bodies are
  buried. He carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes.
  Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek, for
  believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and listens to acid rock.
  Hell no. Acid's never done acid! Acid's into acid house music.
  Jesus. The very idea of doing LSD. Our parents did LSD, ya clown.
  Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full lighthouse
  glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt to
  win the boy over. The Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is giving career
  advice to Knight Lightning! "Your experience would be very valuable
  -- a real asset," she tells him with unmistakeable sixty-thousand-
  watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated. He listens with unfeigned
  attention. He's nodding and saying yes ma'am. Yes, Craig, you too
  can forget all about money and enter the glamorous and horribly
  underpaid world of PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME! You can put your
  former friends in prison -- ooops....
  You cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely. You cannot
  beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings. Sooner or
  later you have to come directly to grips. And yet the very act of
  assembling here has changed the entire situation drastically. John
  Quarterman, author of The Matrix, explains the Internet at his
  symposium. It is the largest news network in the world, it is
  growing by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure Internet
  because you cannot stop it in place. It cannot stop, because there
  is no one anywhere in the world with the authority to stop Internet.
  It changes, yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-
  industrial, postmodern world and it generates community wherever it
  touches, and it is doing this all by itself.
  Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik. Barlow
  says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He does rather. Shaven neck,
  the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close, unruly tangle of black
  hair on top that looks pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and
  misses all the sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his
  acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE
  HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least pretending
  to.... Unlike "Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of
  nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo cyberpunk
  fanzine, and then started grilling her on her ethics. She was
  squirmin', too.... Drake, scarecrow-tall with his floppy blond
  mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and black leather jacket lettered
  ILLUMINATI in red, gives off an unmistakeable air of the bohemian
  literatus. Drake is the kind of guy who reads British industrial
  design magazines and appreciates William Gibson because the quality
  of the prose is so tasty. Drake could never touch a phone or a
  keyboard again, and he'd still have the nose- ring and the blurry
  photocopied fanzines and the sampled industrial music. He's a
  radical punk with a desktop- publishing rig and an Internet address.
  Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's been
  physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to phreak.
  Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them are
  about the same height and body-build. Denning's blue eyes flash
  behind the round window- frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I
  was 'quaint?'" she asks Phiber, quaintly.
  It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed... "Well, I uh,
  you know...."
  "I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the
  rescue, the journo gift of gab... She is neat and dapper and yet
  there's an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden
  behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning
  would look great inside a china cabinet... The Cryptographeress....
  The Cryptographrix... whatever... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just
  like his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys
  as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks, a
  spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's
  tie.... This fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and
  hyperintelligent couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and
  finer parallel universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain
  Teasers column in Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady hang
  out with these unsavory characters?
  Because the time has come for it, that's why. Because she's the best
  there is at what she does.
  Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime.... With
  his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands, the
  great visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser
  mortals like an icebreaker.... His eyes are fixed on the future with
  the rigidity of a bronze statue.... Eventually, he tells his
  audience, all business crime will be computer crime, because
  businesses will do everything through computers. "Computer crime" as
  a category will vanish.
  In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and
  evaporate.... Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike,
  everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical
  abstraction... Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing
  flaps in the world of digital computation.... The radio-frequency
  emanation scandal... KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy,
  but nobody else ever has.... The salami-slice fraud, mostly
  mythical... "Crimoids," he calls them.... Computer viruses are the
  current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than most people let on,
  but the novelty is fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at the
  moment, the press is visibly hungering for something more
  outrageous.... The Great Man shares with us a few speculations on
  the coming crimoids.... Desktop Forgery! Wow.... Computers stolen
  just for the sake of the information within them -- data- napping!
  Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the coming thing....
  Phantom nodes in the Internet!
  Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical
  air... He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and
  a very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley... Aphorisms
  emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis... There is no such thing
  as an adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently
  powerful adversary.... Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect
  of security... People are the primary weakness in all information
  systems... The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted
  upward.... Don't ever violate your security by publicly describing
  your security measures...
  People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet there is
  something about the elemental purity of this guy's philosophy that
  compels uneasy respect.... Parker sounds like the only sane guy left
  in the lifeboat, sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from
  deep moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the broken
  leg and the checkered past, is the one who has to be, err.... that
  is, Mr. Harvey is best placed to make the necessary sacrifice for
  the security and indeed the very survival of the rest of this
  lifeboat's crew.... Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully,
  is a nasty topic, and we wish we didn't have to have it... The
  security expert, armed with method and logic, must think -- imagine
  -- everything that the adversary might do before the adversary might
  actually do it. It is as if the criminal's dark brain were an
  extensive subprogram within the shining cranium of Donn Parker. He
  is a Holmes whose Moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be
  perfectly simulated.
  CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding. It is a
  happy time, a happy ending, they know their world is changing
  forever tonight, and they're proud to have been there to see it
  happen, to talk, to think, to help.
  And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself,
  as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses
  and dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever, and it
  takes a while to pinpoint it.
  It is the End of the Amateurs.


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