Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use


			    THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

	           Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

PART FOUR:  THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
	

	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, podium-
pounding, 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.

				#

	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 computer-
crime 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 tie-
dyed 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 "user-
opaque."  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 long-
time 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 sharp-
dressing, 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-and-
seizure.   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 ham-
handed powers-that-be.   The resultant issue of *Harper's* 
magazine posed the question as to whether computer-
intrusion 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, craggy-
faced, 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 free-
spirit 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."

					#         

	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  forty-
one-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 computer-
graphics 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.


                                ==Phrack Inc.==

                      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


Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in 
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of 
the following centers:

     o  Special Services Center (SSC)
     o  Major Accounts Center (MAC)
     o  Serving Test Center (STC)
     o  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.

System Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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)


Preservice/Installation Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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:

o  All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)
o  All PSAP circuit ID's
o  1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each 
PSAP
   (1004 Section K, L, M)
o  Network configuration
o  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:

1) Switching Control Center
        - E911 translations
        - Trunking
        - End office and Tandem office hardware/software
2) Recent Change Memory Administration Center
        - Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations
        - Processes validity errors and rejects
3) Line and Number Administration
        - Verification of TN/ESN translations
4) Special Service Center/Major Account Center
        - Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host 
troubles
        - Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports
        - Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation
        - Customer notification of status and restoration
        - Analyzation of "chronic" troubles
        - Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits
5) Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)
        - Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and 
Telco owned sets
6) Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
        - E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)
7) Area Maintenance Engineer
        - Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network 
related E911 troubles


Maintenance Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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.

					#

	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.

					#

	  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. 

				#

	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.

					#

	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.	

					#

	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:

	"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company

			ATTENTION

	"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*	
	 
	  			#

	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.

					#

	"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.

***********

Afterword:  The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later

	Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace 
real.  It feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote this 
book.  In terms of the generations of computing machinery 
involved, that's pretty much the case.

	The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically 
since 1990.  A new U.S. Administration is in power whose 
personnel are, if anything, only too aware of the nature and 
potential of electronic networks.  It's now clear to all players 
concerned that the status quo is dead-and-gone in American 
media and telecommunications, and almost any territory on 
the electronic frontier is up for grabs.  Interactive multimedia, 
cable-phone alliances, the Information Superhighway, fiber-
to-the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive growth of 
cellular and the Internet -- the earth trembles visibly.

	The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T.  By 1993, 
however, AT&T had successfully devoured the computer 
company NCR in an unfriendly takeover, finally giving the 
pole-climbers a major piece of the digital action.  AT&T 
managed to rid itself of ownership of the troublesome UNIX 
operating system, selling it to Novell, a netware company, 
which was itself preparing for a savage market dust-up with 
operating-system titan Microsoft.  Furthermore, AT&T 
acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a 
potential wireless whip-hand over its former progeny, the 
RBOCs.  The RBOCs themselves were now AT&T's clearest 
potential rivals, as the Chinese firewalls between regulated 
monopoly and frenzied digital entrepreneurism began to melt 
and collapse headlong.
  
	AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping 
awestruck praise by commentators in 1993.   AT&T had 
managed to avoid any more major software crashes in its 
switching stations.  AT&T's newfound reputation as "the 
nimble giant" was all the sweeter, since AT&T's traditional 
rival giant in the world of multinational computing, IBM, was 
almost prostrate by 1993.  IBM's vision of the commercial 
computer-network of the future, "Prodigy," had managed to 
spend $900 million without a whole heck of a lot to show for it, 
while AT&T, by contrast, was boldly speculating on the 
possibilities of personal communicators and hedging its bets 
with investments in handwritten interfaces.  In 1990 AT&T had 
looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.

	At least, AT&T's *advertising* looked like the future.  
Similar public attention was riveted on the massive $22 billion 
megamerger between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant 
Tele-Communications Inc.   Nynex was buying into cable 
company Viacom International.  BellSouth was buying stock in 
Prime Management, Southwestern Bell acquiring a cable 
company in Washington DC, and so forth.   By stark contrast, 
the Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did not 
even exist, had no advertising budget at all.  And yet, almost 
below the level of governmental and corporate awareness,  the 
Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path, 
growing at a rate that defied comprehension.  Kids who might 
have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years earlier 
were now surfing the Internet, where their natural urge to 
explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such 
mindboggling vastness that the very idea of hacking passwords 
seemed rather a waste of time.  

	By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock 'em down, 
panic-striking, teenage-hacker  computer-intrusion scandal in 
many long months.  There had, of course, been some striking 
and well-publicized acts of illicit computer access, but they had 
been committed by adult white-collar industry insiders in clear 
pursuit of personal or commercial advantage.  The kids, by 
contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

	Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots 
network of personal bulletin board systems.  In 1993, there 
were an estimated 60,000 boards in America; the population of 
boards had fully doubled since Operation Sundevil in 1990.  The 
hobby was transmuting fitfully into a genuine industry.  The 
board community were no longer obscure hobbyists; many 
were still hobbyists and proud of it, but board sysops and 
advanced board users had become a far more cohesive and 
politically aware community, no longer allowing themselves to 
be obscure.

	The specter of cyberspace in the late 1980s, of outwitted 
authorities trembling in fear before teenage hacker whiz-kids, 
seemed downright antiquated by 1993.  Law enforcement 
emphasis had changed, and the favorite electronic villain of 
1993 was not the vandal child, but  the victimizer of children, 
the digital child pornographer.  "Operation Longarm,"  a child-
pornography computer raid carried out by the previously little-
known cyberspace rangers of the U.S. Customs Service, was 
almost the size of Operation Sundevil, but received very little 
notice by comparison.  

	The huge and well-organized "Operation Disconnect," 
an FBI strike against telephone rip-off con-artists, was 
actually larger than Sundevil.  "Operation Disconnect" had its 
brief moment in the sun of publicity, and then vanished utterly.  
It was unfortunate that a law-enforcement affair as 
apparently well-conducted as Operation Disconnect, which 
pursued telecom adult career criminals a hundred times more 
morally repugnant than teenage hackers, should have received 
so little attention and fanfare, especially compared to the 
abortive Sundevil and the basically disastrous efforts of the 
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.  But the life of 
an electronic policeman is seldom easy.

	If any law enforcement event truly deserved full-scale 
press coverage (while somehow managing to escape it), it was 
the amazing saga of New York State Police Senior 
Investigator Don Delaney Versus the Orchard Street Finger-
Hackers.  This story  probably represents the real future of 
professional telecommunications crime in America.  The finger-
hackers sold, and still sell, stolen long-distance phone service 
to a captive clientele of illegal aliens in New York City.  This  
clientele is desperate to call home, yet as a group, illegal aliens 
have few legal means of obtaining standard phone service, 
since their very presence in the United States is against the 
law.  The finger-hackers of Orchard Street were very unusual 
"hackers," with an astonishing lack of any kind of genuine 
technological knowledge.  And yet these New York call-sell 
thieves showed a street-level ingenuity appalling in its single-
minded sense of larceny.

	There was no dissident-hacker rhetoric about  freedom-
of-information among the finger-hackers.  Most of them came 
out of the cocaine-dealing fraternity, and they retailed stolen 
calls with the same street-crime techniques of lookouts and 
bagholders that a crack gang would employ.  This was down-
and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized crime, carried out by crime 
families every day, for cash on the barrelhead, in the harsh 
world of the streets.  The finger-hackers dominated certain 
payphones in certain strikingly unsavory neighborhoods.  They 
provided a service no one else would give to a clientele with 
little to lose. 

	With such a vast supply of electronic crime  at hand, Don 
Delaney rocketed from a background in homicide to teaching 
telecom crime at FLETC in less than three years.  Few can rival 
Delaney's hands-on, street-level experience in phone fraud.  
Anyone in 1993 who still believes telecommunications crime to 
be something rare and arcane should have a few words with 
Mr Delaney.  Don Delaney has also written two fine essays, on 
telecom fraud and computer crime, in Joseph Grau's *Criminal 
and Civil Investigations Handbook* (McGraw Hill 1993).

	*Phrack* was still publishing in 1993, now under the able 
editorship of Erik Bloodaxe.  Bloodaxe made a determined 
attempt to get law enforcement and corporate security to pay 
real money for their electronic copies of *Phrack,* but, as 
usual, these stalwart defenders of intellectual property 
preferred to pirate the magazine.  Bloodaxe has still not gotten 
back any of his property from the seizure raids of March 1, 
1990.  Neither has the Mentor, who is still the managing editor 
of Steve Jackson Games.  

	Nor has Robert Izenberg, who has suspended his court 
struggle to get his machinery back.  Mr Izenberg has calculated 
that his $20,000 of equipment seized in 1990 is, in 1993, worth 
$4,000 at most.  The missing software, also gone out his door, 
was long ago replaced.   He might, he says, sue for the sake of 
principle, but he feels that the people who seized his machinery 
have already been discredited, and won't be doing any more 
seizures.  And even if his machinery were returned -- and in 
good repair, which is doubtful -- it will  be essentially worthless 
by 1995.  Robert Izenberg no longer works for IBM, but has a 
job programming for a major telecommunications company in 
Austin.    

	Steve Jackson won his case against the Secret Service on 
March 12, 1993, just over three years after the federal raid on 
his enterprise.   Thanks to the delaying tactics available 
through the legal doctrine of "qualified immunity," Jackson was 
tactically forced to drop his suit against the individuals William 
Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kluepfel.   (Cook, 
Foley, Golden and Kluepfel did, however, testify during the 
trial.) 

	The Secret Service fought vigorously in the case, battling 
Jackson's lawyers right down the line, on the (mostly 
previously untried) legal turf of the Electronic Communications 
Privacy Act and the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.  The Secret 
Service denied they were legally or morally responsible for 
seizing the work of a publisher.   They claimed that (1)  
Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books anyhow, and (2) 
the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was a "publisher" 
when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only vanished by 
accident because they merely happened to be inside the 
computers the agents were appropriating. 

	The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in 
reading and erasing all the supposedly "private" e-mail inside 
Jackson's seized board, Illuminati.  The USSS attorneys 
claimed the seizure did not violate the Electronic 
Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't actually 
"intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire, but 
only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk inside 
Jackson's computer.  They also claimed that USSS agents 
hadn't read any of the private mail on Illuminati; and anyway, 
even supposing that they had, they were allowed to do that by 
the subpoena.  

	The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the 
Secret Service attorneys went so far as to allege that the 
federal raid against the gaming company had actually 
*improved Jackson's business*  thanks to the ensuing 
nationwide publicity. 

	It was a long and rather involved trial.  The judge 
seemed most perturbed, not by the arcane matters of electronic 
law, but by the fact that the Secret Service could have avoided 
almost all the consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson his 
computers back in short order.   The Secret Service easily could 
have looked at everything in Jackson's computers, recorded 
everything, and given the machinery back, and there would 
have been no major scandal or federal court suit.  On the 
contrary, everybody simply would have had a good laugh.  
Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never entered the 
heads of the Chicago-based investigators.  They seemed to 
have concluded unilaterally, and without due course of law, 
that the world would be better off if Steve Jackson didn't have 
computers.  Golden and Foley claimed that they had both never 
even heard of the Privacy Protection Act.  Cook had heard of 
the Act, but he'd decided on his own that the Privacy Protection 
Act had nothing to do with Steve Jackson.

	The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial, both 
sides deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent that 
would stake-out big claims for their interests in cyberspace.   
Jackson and his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that the 
least e-mail remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer 
deserves the same somber civil-rights protection as that 
afforded *The New York Times.*  By stark contrast, the Secret 
Service's attorneys argued boldly that the contents of an 
electronic bulletin board have no more expectation of privacy 
than a heap of postcards.  In the final analysis, very little was 
firmly nailed down.  Formally, the legal rulings in the Jackson 
case apply only in the federal Western District of Texas.   It 
was, however, established that these were real civil-liberties 
issues that powerful people were prepared to go to the 
courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems, though 
it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the seizer.   The Secret 
Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a 
thousand dollars each to three of Jackson's angry and offended 
board users.  And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the 
single-line bulletin board system "Illuminati" seized in 1990,  
now rejoices in possession of a huge privately-owned Internet 
node, "io.com," with dozens of phone-lines on its  own T-1 
trunk.  

	Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of 
his case available electronically, for interested parties.  And yet, the
Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal seems 
likely and the EFF is also gravely dissatisfied with the ruling on 
electronic interception.

	The WELL, home of the American electronic civil 
libertarian movement, added two thousand more users and 
dropped its aging Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new 
Sun Sparcstation.  Search-and-seizure dicussions on the WELL 
are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic in 
digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption for 
private citizens.

	The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home 
in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the 
Clinton Administration.  Its new executive director, ECPA 
pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained a 
reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF 
devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels of the 
computer and telecommunications industry.  EFF's pro-
encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were 
especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of highly 
variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open 
and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the FBI 
and the NSA.

	EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection 
to an institution.  EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again 
sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own success, 
by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF guru and 
gray eminence.   John Perry Barlow, for his part, left Wyoming, 
quit the Republican Party, and moved to New York City, 
accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones.   Mike Godwin 
left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal adviser to the 
electronically afflicted.

	After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved 
her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up 
boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal 
wiretapping.  Many civil libertarians, who regarded the 
practice of wiretapping with deep occult horror,  were 
crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known 
"hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended 
police and public interests in official eavesdropping.  However, 
no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr. 
Denning in the slightest.  She not only made up her own mind, 
she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.

	In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception, Phiber 
Optik, Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the 
machineries of legal prosecution.  Acid Phreak and Scorpion 
were sent to prison for six months, six months of home 
detention, 750 hours of community service, and, oddly, a $50 
fine for conspiracy to commit computer crime.  Phiber Optik, 
the computer intruder with perhaps the highest public profile in 
the entire world, took the longest to plead guilty, but, facing 
the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally did so.  He was 
sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

	As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet, 
Leftist and Urvile...   Urvile now works for a software 
company in Atlanta.  He is still on probation and still repaying 
his enormous fine.  In fifteen months, he will once again be 
allowed to own a personal computer.  He is still a convicted 
federal felon, but has not had any legal difficulties since leaving 
prison.  He has lost contact with Prophet and Leftist.   
Unfortunately, so have I, though not through lack of honest 
effort.

	Knight Lightning, now 24,  is a technical writer for 
the federal government in Washington DC.  He has still not 
been accepted into law school, but having spent more than his 
share of time in the company of attorneys, he's come to think 
that maybe an MBA would be more to the point.   He still owes 
his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling steadily since he 
is manfully working two jobs.  Knight Lightning customarily 
wears a suit and tie and carries a valise.  He has a federal 
security clearance.

	Unindicted *Phrack* co-editor Taran King is also a 
technical writer in Washington DC,  and recently got married.

	Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently 
lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale Internet 
node, "netsys.com."   He programs professionally for a 
company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.

	Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law 
Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues 
involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system are 
rather more complex than they at first appear to be.

	Gail Thackeray  briefly considered going into private 
security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa 
County District Attorney's Office (with a salary).  She is still 
vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix, 
Arizona.

	The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy 
Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.

	As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-).  I thankfully abandoned 
my brief career as  a true-crime journalist and wrote a new 
science fiction novel, *Heavy Weather,* and assembled a new 
collection of short stories, *Globalhead.*  I also write 
nonfiction regularly,  for the popular-science column in *The 
Magazine of  Fantasy and Science Fiction.*  

	I like life better on the far side of the boundary between 
fantasy and reality;  but I've come to recognize that reality has 
an unfortunate  way of annexing fantasy for its own purposes.  
That's why I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for  EFF-
Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group (eff-
austin@tic.com).  I don't think I will ever get over my 
experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be 
involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest of my 
life.

	It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book on 
computer crime and civil liberties issues.   I truly believe that I 
could write another book much like this one, every year.  
Cyberspace is very big.  There's a lot going on out there, far 
more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though 
growing, cadre of network-literate reporters.  I do wish I could 
do more work on this topic, because the various people of 
cyberspace are an element of our society that definitely requires 
sustained study and attention.  

	But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my mind, 
and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more 
imagination than discipline.  Having done my stint as an 
electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those stalwart few 
who do it every day.  I may return to this topic some day, but I 
have no real plans to do so.  However, I didn't have any real 
plans to write "Hacker Crackdown," either.  Things happen, 
nowadays.  There are landslides in cyberspace.  I'll just have to 
try and stay alert and on my feet.

	The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed.  
We are living through the fastest technological transformation 
in human history.  I was glad to have a chance to document 
cyberspace during one moment in its long mutation; a kind of 
strobe-flash of the maelstrom.  This book is already out-of-
date, though, and it will be quite obsolete in another five years.  
It seems a pity.

	However, in about fifty years, I think this book might 
seem quite interesting.  And in a hundred years, this book 
should seem mind-bogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will 
probably seem far weirder to an audience in 2092 than it ever 
seemed to the contemporary readership.

	Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of 
sustained attention.   Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by 
reading the invaluable electronic magazine  Computer 
underground Digest  (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the subject 
header: SUB CuD and a message that says:  SUB CuD your 
name     your.full.internet@address).  I also read Jack Rickard's 
bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch  Magazine* for print news 
of the BBS and online community.  And, needless to say, I read 
*Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks and 
acts like it really belongs in this decade.  There are other ways 
to learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your 
efforts very well.

	When I myself want to publish something electronically, 
which I'm doing with increasing frequency, I generally put it on 
the gopher at Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well, 
Texan Internet consultants  (tic.com).  This book can be found 
there.  I think it is a worthwhile act to let this work go free.  

	From thence, one's bread floats out onto the dark waters 
of cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold.  And of course, 
thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing 
ecosystem of bizarre and gnawingly hungry cybermarine life-
forms.  For this author at least, that's all that really counts.

	Thanks for your attention  *8-)

	Bruce Sterling  bruces@well.sf.ca.us  -- New Years' Day 
1994, Austin Texas
