CRIME & PUZZLEMENT


.Desperados of the DataSphere 

So me and my sidekick Howard, we was sitting out in front of the 40
	Rod Saloon one evening when he all of a sudden says, Lookee here. What 
do you reckon? I look up and theres these two strangers riding into town. 
Theyre young and got kind of a restless, bored way about em. A person 
dont need both eyes to see they mean trouble....
	Well, that wasnt quite how it went. Actually, Howard and I were 
floating blind as cave fish in the electronic barrens of the WELL, so the whole 
incident passed as words on a display screen:

Howard:	Interesting couple of newusers just signed 
			on. One calls himself acid and the others 
			optik.

Barlow:	Hmmm. What are their real names?

Howard:	Check their finger files.

	And so I typed !finger acid. Several seconds later the WELLs Sequent 
computer sent the following message to my Macintosh in Wyoming:
 
Login name: acid		In real life: Acid Phreak

	By this, I knew that the WELL had a new resident and that his corporeal 
analog was supposedly called Acid Phreak. Typing !finger optik yielded 
results of similar insufficiency, including the claim that someone, somewhere 
in the real world, was walking around calling himself Phiber Optik. I 
doubted it.
	However, associating these sparse data with the knowledge that the 
WELL was about to host a conference on computers and security rendered 
the conclusion that I had made my first sighting of genuine computer 
crackers. As the arrival of an outlaw was a major event to the settlements of 
the Old West, so was the appearance of crackers cause for stir on the WELL. 
	The WELL (or Whole Earth Lectronic Link) is an example of the latest 
thing in frontier villages, the computer bulletin board. In this kind of small 
town, Main Street is a central minicomputer to which (in the case of the 
WELL) as many as 64 microcomputers may be connected at one time by 
phone lines and little blinking boxes called modems. 
	In this silent world, all conversation is typed. To enter it, one forsakes 
both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone. You can see what 
your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not what either they or their 
physical surroundings look like. Town meetings are continuous and 
discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules. 
	There are thousands of these nodes in the United States, ranging from 
PC clone hamlets of a few users to mainframe metros like CompuServe, with 
its 550,000 subscribers. They are used by corporations to transmit memoranda 
and spreadsheets, universities to disseminate research, and a multitude of 
factions, from apiarists to Zoroastrians, for purposes unique to each.
	Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all connected to 
one another. Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the Net. It 
extends across that immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic 
fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer William Gibson named 
Cyberspace. 
	Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the 19th 
Century West. It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, 
verbally terse (unless you happen to be a court stenographer), hard to get 
around in, and up for grabs. Large institutions already claim to own the 
place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes 
to the point of sociopathy. It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both 
outlaws and new ideas about liberty.
	Recognizing this, Harpers Magazine decided in December, 1989, to 
hold one of its periodic Forums on the complex of issues surrounding 
computers, information, privacy, and electronic intrusion or cracking. 
Appropriately, they convened their conference in Cyberspace, using the 
WELL as the site.
	Harpers invited an odd lot of about 40 participants. These included: 
Clifford Stoll, whose book The Cuckoos Egg details his cunning efforts to 
nab a German cracker. John Draper or Capn Crunch, the granddaddy of 
crackers whose blue boxes got Wozniak and Jobs into consumer electronics. 
Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly of Whole Earth fame. Steven Levy, who wrote 
the seminal Hackers. A retired Army colonel named Dave Hughes. Lee 
Felsenstein, who designed the Osborne computer and was once called the 
Robespierre of computing. A UNIX wizard and former hacker named Jef 
Poskanzer. There was also a score of aging techno-hippies, the crackers, and 
me.
	What I was doing there was not precisely clear since Ive spent most of 
my working years either pushing cows or song-mongering, but I at least 
brought to the situation a vivid knowledge of actual cow-towns, having lived 
in or around one most of my life. 
	That and a kind of innocence about both the technology and morality 
of Cyberspace which was soon to pass into the confusion of knowledge.
	At first, I was inclined toward sympathy with Acid n Optik as well as 
their colleagues, Adelaide, Knight Lightning, Taran King, and Emmanuel. 
Ive always been more comfortable with outlaws than Republicans, despite 
having more certain credentials in the latter camp. 
	But as the Harpers Forum mushroomed into a boom-town of ASCII 
text (the participants typing 110,000 words in 10 days), I began to wonder. 
These kids were fractious, vulgar, immature, amoral, insulting, and too 
damned good at their work. 
	Worse, they inducted a number of former kids like myself into Middle 
Age. The long feared day had finally come when some gunsel would yank my 
beard and call me, too accurately, an old fart. 
	Under ideal circumstances, the blind gropings of bulletin board 
discourse force a kind of Noh drama stylization on human commerce. 
Intemperate responses, or flames as they are called, are common even 
among conference participants who understand one another, which, it became 
immediately clear, the cyberpunks and techno-hippies did not. 
	My own initial enthusiasm for the crackers wilted under a steady 
barrage of typed testosterone. I quickly remembered I didnt know much 
about who they were, what they did, or how they did it. I also remembered 
stories about crackers working in league with the Mob, ripping off credit card 
numbers and getting paid for them in (stolen) computer equipment. 
	And I remembered Kevin Mitnik. Mitnik, now 25, recently served 
federal time for a variety of computer and telephone related crimes. Prior to 
incarceration, Mitnik was, by all accounts, a dangerous guy with a computer. 
He disrupted phone company operations and arbitrarily disconnected the 
phones of celebrities. Like the kid in Wargames, he broke into the North 
American Defense Command computer in Colorado Springs. 
	Unlike the kid in Wargames, he is reputed to have made a practice of 
destroying and altering data. There is even the (perhaps apocryphal) story 
that he altered the credit information of his probation officer and other 
enemies. Digital Equipment claimed that his depredations cost them more 
than $4 million in computer downtime and file rebuilding. Eventually, he 
was turned in by a friend who, after careful observation, had decided he was 
a menace to society.  
	His spectre began to hang over the conference. After several days of 
strained diplomacy, the discussion settled into a moral debate on the ethics of 
security and went critical. 
	The techno-hippies were of the unanimous opinion that, in Dylans 
words, one must be honest to live outside the law.  But these young 
strangers apparently lived by no code save those with which they unlocked 
forbidden regions of the Net. 
	They appeared to think that improperly secured systems deserved to 
be violated and, by extension, that unlocked houses ought to be robbed. This 
latter built particular heat in me since I refuse, on philosophical grounds, to 
lock my house. 
	Civility broke down. We began to see exchanges like:

Dave Hughes:	Clifford Stoll said a wise thing that 
				no one has commented on. That networks 
				are built on trust. If they arent, 
					they should 	be.

Acid Phreak:	Yeah. Sure. And we should use the 	
				honor system as a first line of secu-
				rity against hack attempts.

Jef Poskanzer:This guy down the street from me some	
			times leaves his back door unlocked. I 	
			told him about it once, but he still 
			does it. If I had the chance to do it 	
			over, I would go in the back door, 		
			shoot him, and take all his money and 
			consumer electronics. Its the only way 	
			to get through to him.

Acid Phreak:	Jef Poskanker (Puss? Canker? yechh) 
					Anyway, now when did you first start 
				having these delusions where 
			computer hacking was even *remotely* 	
		 	similar to murder? 

	Presented with such a terrifying amalgam of raw youth and apparent 
power, we fluttered like a flock of indignant Babbitts around the Status Quo, 
defending it heartily. One former hacker howled to the Harpers editor in 
charge of the forum, Do you or do you not have names and addresses for 
these criminals? Though they had committed no obvious crimes, he was 
ready to call the police. 
	They finally got to me with:

Acid Phreak: 	Whoever said theyd leave the door open 
				to their house... where do you live? 
				(the address) Leave it to me in mail if 
				you like.
	
	I had never encountered anyone so apparently unworthy of my trust as 
these little nihilists. They had me questioning a basic tenet, namely that the 
greatest security lies in vulnerability. I decided it was time to put that 
principal to the test... 

Barlow:		Acid. My house is at 372 North Franklin 
				Street in Pinedale, Wyoming. If youre 
				heading north on Franklin, you go about 
				two blocks off the main drag before you 
				run into hay meadow on the left. Ive 
				got the last house before the field. 
				The computer is always on...
			And is that really what you mean? Are 	
			you merely just the kind of little 		
			sneak that goes around looking for easy 	
			places to violate? You disappoint me, 	
			pal. For all your James Dean-On-Silicon 	
			rhetoric, youre not a cyberpunk. 		
			Youre just a punk.

Acid Phreak:	Mr. Barlow: Thank you for posting all I 
				need to get your credit information and 
				a whole lot more! Now, who is to 
			blame? ME for getting it or YOU for 	
				being such an idiot?! 
			I think this should just about sum 		
			things up.

Barlow:		Acid, if youve got a lesson to teach 
				me, I hope its not that its idiotic 
				to trust ones fellow man. Life on 	
				those 	terms would be endless and 
bru-				tal. Id try to tell you something 	
				about conscience, but Id sound like 
				Father OFlannigan trying to reform the 
				punk thats about to gutshoot him. For 
				no more reason that to watch him die.
			But actually, if you take it upon your-	
			self to destroy my credit, you might do 	
			me a favor. Ive been looking for 
			something to put the brakes on my bur-	
			geoning materialism.

	I spent a day wondering whether I was dealing with another Kevin 
Mitnik before the other shoe dropped:

Barlow:		With crackers like acid and optik, the 
				issue is less intelligence than alien-
				ation. Trade their modems for 
			skateboards and only a slight concep-	
			tual shift would occur.

Optik: 		You have some pair of balls comparing 
				my talent with that of a skateboarder. 
				Hmmm... This was indeed boring, but 
					nonetheless:
	
At which point he downloaded my credit history. 
	Optik had hacked the core of TRW, an institution which has made my 
business (and yours) their business, extracting from it an abbreviated (and 
incorrect) version of my personal financial life. With this came the implication 
that he and Acid could and would revise it to my disadvantage if I didnt 
back off. 
	I have since learned that while getting someones TRW file is fairly 
trivial, changing it is not. But at that time, my assessment of the crackers black 
skills was one of superstitious awe. They were digital brujos about to zombify 
my economic soul. 
	To a middle-class American, ones credit rating has become nearly 
identical to his freedom. It now appeared that I was dealing with someone 
who had both the means and desire to hoodoo mine, leaving me trapped in a 
life of wrinkled bills and money order queues. Never again would I call the 
Sharper Image on a whim.
	Ive been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police 
custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one has ever put 
the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment. I realized that we 
had problems which exceeded the human conductivity of the WELLs 
bandwidth. If someone were about to paralyze me with a spell, I wanted a 
more visceral sense of him than could fit through a modem.
	I e-mailed him asking him to give me a phone call. I told him I 
wouldnt insult his skills by giving him my phone number and, with the 
assurance conveyed by that challenge, I settled back and waited for the phone 
to ring. Which, directly, it did.
	In this conversation and the others that followed I encountered an 
intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who sounded, and 
continues to sound, as though theres little harm in him to man or data. His 
cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory, and Ive begun to wonder if 
we wouldnt also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned 
all the caves.
	The terrifying poses which Optik and Acid had been striking on screen 
were a media-amplified example of a human adaptation Id seen before: One 
becomes as he is beheld. They were simply living up to what they thought we, 
and, more particularly, the editors of Harpers, expected of them. Like the 
televised tears of disaster victims, their snarls adapted easily to mass 
distribution. 
	Months later, Harpers took Optik, Acid and me to dinner at a 
Manhattan restaurant which, though very fancy, was appropriately Chinese. 
Acid and Optik, as material beings, were well-scrubbed and fashionably-clad. 
They looked to be dangerous as ducks. But, as Harpers and the rest of the 
media have discovered to their delight, the boys had developed distinctly 
showier personae for their rambles through the howling wilderness of 
Cyberspace. 
	Glittering with spikes of binary chrome, they strode past the kleig 
lights and into the digital distance. There they would be outlaws. It was only a 
matter of time before they started to believe themselves as bad as they 
sounded. And no time at all before everyone else did. 
	In this, they were like another kid named Billy, many of whose feral 
deeds in the pre-civilized West were encouraged by the same dime novelist 
who chronicled them. And like Tom Horn, they seemed to have some doubt 
as to which side of the law they were on. Acid even expressed an ambition to 
work for the government someday, nabbing terrorists and code abusers. 
	There is also a frontier ambiguity to the crimes the crackers commit. 
They are not exactly stealing VCRs. Copying a text file from TRW doesnt 
deprive its owner of anything except informational exclusivity. (Though it 
may said that information has monetary value only in proportion to its 
containment.)  
	There was no question that they were making unauthorized use of data 
channels. The night I met them, they left our restaurant table and disappeared 
into the phone booth for a long time. I didnt see them marshalling quarters 
before they went. 
	And, as I became less their adversary and more their scoutmaster, I 
began to get conference calls in which six or eight of them would crack pay 
phones all over New York and simultaneously land on my line in Wyoming. 
These deft maneuvers made me think of sky-diving stunts where large groups 
convene geometrically in free fall. In this case, the risk was largely legal.
	Their other favorite risky business is the time-honored adolescent sport 
of trespassing. They insist on going where they dont belong. But then teen-
age boys have been proceeding uninvited since the dawn of human puberty. 
It seems hard-wired. The only innovation is in the new form of the forbidden 
zone the means of getting in it. 
	In fact, like Kevin Mitnik, I broke into NORAD when I was 17. A friend 
and I left a nearby woodsie (as rustic adolescent drunks were called in 
Colorado) and tried to get inside the Cheyenne Mountain. The chrome-
helmeted Air Force MPs held us for about 2 hours before letting us go. They 
werent much older than us and knew exactly our level of national security 
threat. Had we come cloaked in electronic mystery, their alert status certainly 
would have been higher.
	Whence rises much of the anxiety. Everything is so ill-defined. How can 
you guess what lies in their hearts when you cant see their eyes? How can one 
be sure that, like Mitnik, they wont cross the line from trespassing into 
another adolescent past time, vandalism? And how can you be sure they pose 
no threat when you dont know what a threat might be?
	And for the crackers, some thrill is derived from the metamorphic 
vagueness of the laws themselves. On the Net, their effects are unpredictable. 
One never knows when theyll bite. 
	This is because most of the statutes invoked against the crackers were 
designed in a very different world from the one they explore. For example, 
can unauthorized electronic access can be regarded as the ethical equivalent 
of old-fashioned trespass? Like open range, the property boundaries of 
Cyberspace are hard to stake and harder still to defend. 
	Is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really theft? 
Is the track-less passage of a mind through TRWs mainframe the same as the 
passage of a pickup through my Back 40? What is a place if Cyberspace is 
everywhere? What are data and what is free speech? How does one treat 
property that has no physical form and can be infinitely reproduced? Is a 
computer the same as a printing press? Can the history of my business affairs 
properly belong to someone else? Can anyone morally claim to own 
knowledge itself?
	If such questions were hard to answer precisely, there are those who are 
ready to try. Based on their experience in the Virtual World, they were about 
as qualified to enforce its mores as I am to write the Law of the Sea. But if they 
lacked technical sophistication, they brought to this task their usual 
conviction. And, of course, badges and guns.

	
.c.Operation Sun Devil

	Recently, we have witnessed an alarming number of young people 
who, for a variety of sociological and psychological reasons, have 
become attached to their computers and are exploiting their potential 
in a criminal manner. Often, a progression of criminal activity occurs 
which involves telecommunications fraud (free long distance phone 
calls), unauthorized access to other computers (whether for profit, 
fascination, ego, or the intellectual challenge), credit card fraud (cash 
advances and unauthorized purchases of goods), and then move on to 
other destructive activities like computer viruses. 
	Our experience shows that many computer hacker suspects are no 
longer misguided teenagers mischievously playing games with their 
computers in their bedrooms. Some are now high tech computer 
operators using computers to engage in unlawful conduct. 
	Excerpts from a statement by Garry M. Jenkins,
	Asst. Director, U. S. Secret Service
						
	The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, 
papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall 
not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, 
support by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to 
be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 

	Amendment IV, The United States Constitution

On January 24, 1990, a platoon of Secret Service agents entered the 
	apartment which Acid Phreak shares with his mother and 12 year old 
sister. The latter was the only person home when they burst through the door 
with guns drawn. They managed to hold her at bay for about half an hour 
until their quarry happened home. 
	By then, they were nearly done packing up Acids worldly goods, 
including his computer, his notes (both paper and magnetic), books, and such 
dubiously dangerous tools as a telephone answering machine, a ghetto blaster 
and his complete collection of audio tapes. One agent asked him to define the 
real purpose of the answering machine and was frankly skeptical when told 
that it answered the phone. The audio tapes seemed to contain nothing but 
music, but who knew what dark data Acid might have encoded between the 
notes....
	When Acids mother returned from work, she found her apartment a 
scene of apprehended criminality. She asked what, exactly, her son had done 
to deserve all this attention and was told that, among other things, he had 
caused the AT&T system crash several days earlier. (Previously AT&T had 
taken full responsibility.) Thus, the agent explained, her darling boy was 
thought to have caused over a billion dollars in damage to the economy of the 
United States. 
	This accusation was never turned into a formal charge. Indeed, no 
charge of any sort of was filed against Mr. Phreak then and, although the 
Secret Service maintained resolute possession of his hardware, software, and 
data, no charge had been charged 4 months later.
	Across town, similar scenes were being played out at the homes of 
Phiber Optik and another colleague code-named Scorpion. Again, 
equipment, notes, disks both hard and soft, and personal effects were 
confiscated. Again no charges were filed.
	Thus began the visible phase of Operation Sun Devil, a two-year Secret 
Service investigation which involved 150 federal agents, numerous local and 
state law enforcement agencies and the combined security resources of 
PacBell, AT&T, Bellcore, Bell South, MCI, U.S. Sprint, Mid-American, 
Southwestern Bell, NYNEX, U.S. West and American Express.
	The focus of this impressive institutional array was the Legion of 
Doom, a group which never had any formal membership list but was thought 
by the members with whom I spoke to number less than 20, nearly all of them 
in their teens or early twenties.
	I asked Acid why theyd chosen such a threatening name. You 
wouldnt want a fairy kind of thing like Legion of Flower Pickers or 
something. But the media ate it up too. Probing the Legion of Doom like it 
was a gang or something, when really it was just a bunch of geeks behind 
terminals.

%%%%%%
	
Sometime in December 1988, a 21 year-old Atlanta-area Legion of 
	Doomster named The Prophet cracked a Bell South computer and 
downloaded a three-page text file which outlined, in bureaucrat-ese of 
surpassing opacity, the administrative procedures and responsibilities for 
marketing, servicing, upgrading, and billing for Bell Souths 911 system. 
	A dense thicket of acronyms, the document was filled with passages 
like: 
	In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning, the 
SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Notes 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.  
	And other such.
	At some risk, I too have a copy of this document. 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 has altered his consciousness beyond the 
ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or Tolstoy. It is, quite simply, the 
worst writing I have ever tried to read. 
	Since the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a 
student of advanced organizational sclerosis...that is, no access codes, trade 
secrets, or proprietary information...I assume The Prophet only copied this 
file as a kind of hunting trophy. He had been to the heart of the forest and had 
returned with this coonskin to nail to the barn door.
	Furthermore, he was proud of his accomplishment, and since such 
trophies are infinitely replicable, he wasnt content to nail it to his door alone. 
Among the places he copied it was a UNIX bulletin board (rather like the 
WELL) in Lockport, Illinois called Jolnet. 
	It was downloaded from there by a 20 year-old hacker and pre-law 
student (whom I had met in the Harpers Forum) who called himself Knight 
Lightning. Though not a member of the Legion of Doom, Knight Lightning 
and a friend, Taran King, also published from St. Louis and his fraternity 
house at the University of Missouri a worldwide hackers magazine called 
Phrack. (From phone phreak and hack.)
	Phrack was an unusual publication in that it was entirely virtual. The 
only time its articles hit paper was when one of its subscribers decided to 
print out a hard copy. Otherwise, its editions existed in Cyberspace and took 
no physical form. 
	When Knight Lightning got hold of the Bell South document, he 
thought it would amuse his readers and reproduced it in the next issue of 
Phrack. He had little reason to think that he was doing something illegal. 
There is nothing in it to indicate that it contains proprietary or even sensitive 
information. Indeed, it closely resembles telco reference documents which 
have long been publicly available.
	However, Rich Andrews, the systems operator who oversaw the 
operation of Jolnet, thought there might be something funny about the 
document when he first ran across it in his system. To be on the safe side, he 
forwarded a copy of it to AT&T officials. He was subsequently contacted by 
the authorities, and he cooperated with them fully. He would regret that later. 
	On the basis of the forgoing, a Grand Jury in Lockport was persuaded 
by the Secret Service in early February to hand down a seven count 
indictment against The Prophet and Knight Lightning, charging them, among 
other things, with interstate transfer of stolen property worth more than 
$5,000. When The Prophet and two of his Georgia colleagues were arrested on 
February 7, 1990, the Atlanta papers reported they faced 40 years in prison 
and a $2 million fine. Knight Lightning was arrested on February 15.  
	The property in question was the afore-mentioned blot on the history of 
prose whose full title was A Bell South Standard Practice (BSP) 660-225-
104SV-Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special 
Services and Major Account Centers, March, 1988.
	And not only was this item worth more than $5,000.00, it was worth, 
according to the indictment and Bell South, precisely $79,449.00. And not a 
penny less. 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....
	In addition to charging Knight Lightning with crimes for which he 
could go to jail for 30 years and be fined $122,000.00, they seized his 
publication, Phrack, along with all related equipment, software and data, 
including his list of subscribers, many of whom would soon lose their 
computers and data for the crime of appearing on it.  
	I talked to Emmanuel Goldstein, the editor of 2600, another hacker 
publication which has been known to publish purloined documents. If they 
could shut down Phrack, couldnt they as easily shut down 2600? 
	He said, Ive got one advantage. I come out on paper and the 
Constitution knows  how to deal with paper. 
	In fact, nearly all publications are now electronic at some point in their 
creation. In a modern newspaper, stories written at the scene are typed to 
screens and then sent by modem to a central computer. This computer 
composes the layout in electronic type and the entire product is transmitted 
electronically to the presses. There, finally, the bytes become ink. 
	Phrack merely omitted the last step in a long line of virtual events. 
However, that omission, and its insignificant circulation, left it vulnerable to 
seizure based on content. If the 911 document had been the Pentagon Papers 
(another proprietary document) and Phrack the New York Times, a 
completion of the analogy would have seen the government stopping 
publication of the Times and seizing its every material possession, from 
notepads to presses. 
	Not that anyone in the newspaper business seemed particularly 
worried about such implications. They, and the rest of the media who 
bothered to report Knight Lightnings arrest, were too obsessed by what they 
portrayed as actual disruptions of emergency service and with marvelling at 
the sociopathy of it. One report expressed relief that no one appeared to have 
died as a result of the intrusions.
	Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the 911 dragnet snared Leonard Rose, aka 
Terminus. A professional computer consultant who specialized in UNIX, 
Rose got a visit from the government early in February. The G-men forcibly 
detained his wife and children for six hours while they interrogated Rose 
about the 911 document and ransacked his system. 
	Rose had no knowledge of the 911 matter. Indeed, his only connection 
had been occasional contact with Knight Lightning over several years...and 
admitted membership in the Legion of Doom. However, when searching his 
hard disk for 911 evidence, they found something else. Like many UNIX 
consultants, Rose did have some UNIX source code in his possession.  
Furthermore, there was evidence that he had transmitted some of it to Jolnet 
and left it there for another consultant. 
	UNIX is a ubiquitous operating system, and though its main virtue is 
its openness to amendment at the source level, it is nevertheless the property 
of AT&T. What had been widely distributed within businesses and 
universities for years was suddenly, in Roses hands, a felonious possession.    
	Finally, the Secret Service rewarded the good citizenship of Rich 
Andrews by confiscating the computer where Jolnet had dwelt, along with all 
the e-mail, read and un-read, which his subscribers had left there. Like the 
many others whose equipment and data were taken by the Secret Service 
subsequently, he wasnt charged with anything. Nor is he likely to be. They 
have already inflicted on him the worst punishment a nerd can suffer: data 
death.
	Andrews was baffled. Im the one that found it, Im the one that turned 
it in...And Im the one thats suffering, he said. 
	One wonders what will happen when they find such documents on the 
hard disks of CompuServe. Maybe Ill just upload my copy of Bell South 
Standard Practice (BSP) 660-225-104SV and see...
	In any case, association with stolen data is all the guilt you need. Its 
quite as if the government could seize your house simply because a guest left 
a stolen VCR in an upstairs bedroom closet. Or confiscate all the mail in a post 
office upon finding a stolen package there. The first concept of modern 
jurisprudence to have arrived in Cyberspace seems to have been Zero 
Tolerance. 
%%%%%%
Rich Andrews was not the last to learn about the Secret Services 
	debonair new attitude toward the 4th Amendments protection against 
unreasonable seizure.  
	Early on March 1, 1990, the offices of a role-playing game publisher in 
Austin, Texas, called Steve Jackson Games were visited by agents of the 
United States Secret Service. They ransacked the premises, broke into several 
locked filing cabinets (damaging them irreparably in the process) and 
eventually left carrying 3 computers, 2 laser printers, several hard disks, and 
many boxes of paper and floppy disks.
	Later in the day, callers to the Illuminati BBS (which Steve Jackson 
Games operated to keep in touch with roll-players around the country) 
encountered the following message: 
	So far we have not received a clear explanation of what the Secret 
Service was looking for, what they expected to find, or much of anything else. 
We are fairly certain that Steve Jackson Games is not the target of whatever 
investigation is being conducted; in any case, we have done nothing illegal 
and have nothing whatsoever to hide. However, the equipment that was 
seized is apparently considered to be evidence in whatever theyre 
investigating, so we arent likely to get it back any time soon. It could be a 
month, it could be never. 
	Its been three months as I write this and, not only has nothing been 
returned to them, but, according to Steve Jackson, the Secret Service will no 
longer take his calls. He figures that, in the months since the raid, his little 
company has lost an estimated $125,000. With such a fiscal hemorrhage, he 
cant afford a lawyer to take after the Secret Service. Both the state and 
national offices of the ACLU told him to run along when he solicited their 
help. 
	He tried to go to the press. As in most other cases, they were unwilling 
to raise the alarm. Jackson theorized, The conservative press is taking the 
attitude that the suppression of evil hackers is a good thing and that anyone 
who happens to be put out of business in the meantime...well, thats just their 
tough luck.
	In fact, Newsweek did run a story about the event, portraying it from 
Jacksons perspective, but they were almost alone in dealing with it.
	What had he done to deserve this nightmare? Role-playing games, of 
which Dungeons and Dragons is the most famous, have been accused of 
creating obsessive involvement in their nerdy young players, but no one 
before had found it necessary to prevent their publication. 
 
%%%%%%

It seems that Steve Jackson had hired the wrong writer. The managing 
	editor of Steve Jackson Games is a former cracker, known by his fellows in 
the Legion of Doom as The Mentor. At the time of the raid, he and the rest of 
the Jackson staff had been working for over a year on a game called GURPS 
Cyberpunk, High-Tech Low-Life Role-Playing. 
	At the time of the Secret Service raid, the game resided entirely on the 
hard disks they confiscated. Indeed, it was their target. They told Jackson that, 
based on its authors background, they had reason to believe it was a 
handbook on computer crime. It was therefore inappropriate for 
publication, 1st Amendment or no 1st Amendment. 
	I got a copy of the game from the trunk of The Mentors car in an 
Austin parking lot. Like the Bell South document, it seemed pretty 
innocuous to me, if a little inscrutable.  Borrowing its flavor from the works of 
William Gibson and Austin sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, it is filled with 
silicon brain implants, holodecks, and gauss guns. 
	It is, as the cover copy puts it, a fusion of the dystopian visions of 
George Orwell and Timothy Leary. Actually, without the gizmos, it 
describes a future kind of like the present its publisher is experiencing at the 
hands of the Secret Service.  
	An unbelievably Byzantine world resides within its 120 large pages of 
small print. (These roll-players must be some kind of idiots savants....) Indeed, 
its a thing of such complexity that I cant swear theres no criminal 
information in there, but then I cant swear that Grateful Dead records dont 
have satanic messages if played backwards. Anythings possible, especially 
inside something as remarkable as Cyberpunk. 
	The most remarkable thing about Cyberpunk is the fact that it was 
printed at all. After much negotiation, Jackson was able to get the Secret 
Service to let him have some of his data back. However, they told him that he 
would be limited to an hour and a half with only one of his three computers. 
Also, according to Jackson, They insisted that all the copies be made by a 
Secret Service agent who was a two-finger typist. So we didnt get much. 
	In the end, Jackson and his staff had to reconstruct most of the game 
from neural rather than magnetic memory. They did have a few very old 
backups, and they retrieved some scraps which had been passed around to 
game testers. They also had the determination of the enraged.  
	Despite government efforts to impose censorship by prior restraint, 
Cyberpunk is now on the market. Presumably, advertising it as The book 
that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service will invigorate sales. But Steve 
Jackson Games, the heretofore prosperous publisher of more than a hundred 
role-playing games, has been forced to lay off more than half of its employees 
and may well be mortally wounded. 
	Any employer who has heard this tale will think hard before he hires a 
computer cracker. Which may be, of course, among the effects the Secret 
Service desires.

%%%%%%

On May 8, 1990, Operation Sun Devil, heretofore an apparently 
	random and nameless trickle of Secret Service actions, swept down on 
the Legion of Doom and its ilk like a bureaucratic tsunami. On that day, the 
Secret Service served 27 search warrants in 14 cities from Plano, Texas, to New 
York, New York.
	The law had come to Cyberspace. When the day was over, transit 
through the wide open spaces of the Virtual World would be a lot trickier. 
	In a press release following the sweep, the Secret Service boasted 
having shut down numerous computer bulletin boards, confiscated 40 
computers, and seized 23,000 disks. They noted in their statement that the 
conceivable criminal violations of this operation have serious implications for 
the health and welfare of all individuals, corporations, and United States 
Government agencies relying on computers and telephones to communicate.
	It was unclear from their statement whether this operation meant the 
Legion of Doom or Operation Sun Devil. There was room to interpret it either 
way.
	Because the deliciously ironic truth is that, aside from the three-page 
Bell South document, the hackers had neither removed nor damaged 
anyones data. Operation Sun Devil, on the other hand, had serious 
implications for a number of folks who relied on computers and telephones 
to communicate. They lost the equivalent of about 5.4 million pages of 
information. Not to mention a few computers and telephones.
	And the welfare of the individuals behind those figures was surely in 
jeopardy. Like the story of the single mother and computer consultant in 
Baltimore whose sole means of supporting herself and her 18-year-old son 
was stripped away early one morning. Secret Service agents broke down her 
door with sledge hammers, entered with guns drawn, and seized all her 
computer equipment. Apparently her son had also been using it....
	Or the father in New York who opened the door at 6:00 AM and found 
a shotgun at his nose. A dozen agents entered. While one of them kept the 
mans wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the 
bedroom of their sleeping 14-year-old. Before leaving, they confiscated every 
piece of electronic equipment in the house, including all the telephones.
	It was enough to suggest that the insurance companies should start 
writing policies against governmental seizure of circuitry. 
	In fairness, one can imagine the governments problem. This is all 
pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the operations of a 
witch coven, Id probably seize everything in sight. How would I tell the 
ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles?
	But as I heard more and more about the vile injustices being heaped on 
my young pals in the Legion of Doom, not to mention the unfortunate folks 
nearby, the less I was inclined toward such temperate thoughts as these. I 
drifted back into a 60s-style sense of the government, thinking it a thing of 
monolithic and evil efficiency and adopting an up-against-the-wall 
willingness to spit words like pig or fascist into my descriptions. 
	In doing so, I endowed the Secret Service with a clarity of intent which 
no agency of government will ever possess. Despite almost every experience 
Ive ever had with federal authority, I keep imagining its competence. 
	For some reason, it was easier to invest the Keystone Kapers of 
Operation Sun Devil with malign purpose rather than confront their 
absurdity straight-on. There is, after all, a twisted kind of comfort in political 
paranoia. It provides one such a sense of orderliness to think that the 
government is neither crazy nor stupid and that its plots, though wicked, are 
succinct.
	I was about to have an experience which would restore both my natural 
sense of unreality and my unwillingness to demean the motives of others. I 
was about to see first hand the disorientation of the law in the featureless 
vastness of Cyberspace.
.c.
.c.
.c.In Search of NuPrometheus

I pity the poor immigrant...
	Bob Dylan

Sometime last June, an angry hacker got hold of a chunk of the highly 
	secret source code which drives the Apple Macintosh. He then distributed 
it to a variety of addresses, claiming responsibility for this act of information 
terrorism in the name of the NuPrometheus League.
	Apple freaked. NuPrometheus had stolen, if not the Apple crown 
jewels, at least a stone from them. Worse, NuPrometheus had then given this 
prize away. Repeatedly.
	All Apple really has to offer the world is the software which lies 
encoded in silicon on the ROM chip of every Macintosh. This set of 
instructions is the cyber-DNA which makes a Macintosh a Macintosh. 
	Worse, much of the magic in this code was put there by people who not 
only do not work for Apple any longer, but might only do so again if 
encouraged with cattle prods. Apples attitude toward its ROM code is a little 
like that of a rich kid toward his inheritance. Not actually knowing how to 
create wealth himself, he guards what he has with hysterical fervor.
	Time passed, and I forgot about the incident. But one recent May 
morning, I learned that others had not. The tireless search for the spectral 
heart of NuPrometheus finally reached Pinedale, Wyoming, where I was the 
object of a two-hour interview by Special Agent Richard Baxter, Jr., of the 
Federal Bureau of Investigation. 
	Poor Agent Baxter didnt know a ROM chip from a vise-grip when he 
arrived, so much of that time was spent trying to educate him on the nature of 
the thing which had been stolen. Or whether stolen was the right term for 
what had happened to it.   
	You know things have rather jumped the groove when potential 
suspects must explain to law enforcers the nature of their alleged 
perpetrations. 
	I wouldnt swear Agent Baxter ever got it quite right. After I showed 
him some actual source code, gave a demonstration of e-mail in action, and 
downloaded a file from the WELL, he took to rubbing his face with both 
hands, peering up over his finger tips and saying, It sure is something, isnt 
it or, whooo-ee. 
	Or my eight-year-old knows more about these things than I do. He 
didnt say this with a fathers pride so much as an immigrants fear of a strange 
new land into which he will be forcibly moved and in which his own child is 
a native. He looked across my keyboard into Cyberspace and didnt like what 
he saw.
	We could have made it harder for one another, but I think we each 
sensed that the other occupied a world which was as bizarre and nonsensical 
as it could be. We did our mutual best to suppress immune response at the 
border.
	Youd have thought his world might have been a little more 
recognizable to me. Not so, it turns out. Because in his world, I found several 
unfamiliar features, including these: 
	1. The Hackers Conference is an underground organization of 
computer outlaws with likely connections to, and almost certainly sympathy 
with, the NuPrometheus League. (Or as Agent Baxter repeatedly put it, the 
New Prosthesis League.) 
	2. John Draper, the aforementioned Capn Crunch, in addition to being 
a known member of the Hackers Conference, is also CEO and president of 
Autodesk, Inc. This is of particular concern to the FBI, because Autodesk has 
many top-secret contracts with the government to supply Star Wars graphics 
imaging and hyperspace technology. Worse, Draper is thought to have 
Soviet contacts.
	He wasnt making this up. He had lengthy documents from the San 
Francisco office to prove it. And in which Autodesks address was certainly 
correct. 
	On the other hand, I know John Draper. While, as I say, he may have 
once distinguished himself as a cracker during the Pleistocene, he is not now, 
never has been, and never will be CEO of Autodesk. He did work there for 
awhile last year, but he was let go long before he got in a position to take over.
	Nor is Autodesk, in my experience with it, the Star Wars skunk works 
which Agent Baxters documents indicated. One could hang out there a long 
time without ever seeing any gold braid. 
	Their primary product is something called AutoCAD, by far the most 
popular computer-aided design software but generally lacking in lethal 
potential. They do have a small development program in Cyberspace, which 
is what they call Virtual Reality. (This, I assume, is the hyperspace to which 
Agent Baxters documents referred.)
	However, Autodesk had reduced its Cyberspace program to a couple 
of programmers. I imagined Randy Walser and Carl Tollander toiling away in 
the dark and lonely service of their country. Didnt work. Then I tried to 
describe Virtual Reality to Agent Baxter, but that didnt work either. In fact, 
he tilted. I took several runs at it, but I could tell I was violating our border 
agreements. These seemed to include a requirement that neither of us try to 
drag the other across into his conceptual zone.
	I fared a little better on the Hackers Conference. Hardly a conspiracy, 
the Hackers Conference is an annual convention originated in 1984 by the 
Point Foundation and the editors of Whole Earth Review. Each year it invites 
about a hundred of the most gifted and accomplished of digital creators. 
Indeed, they are the very people who have conducted the personal computer 
revolution. Agent Baxter looked at my list of Hackers Conference attendees 
and read their bios. 
	 These are the people who actually design this stuff, arent they? He 
was incredulous. Their corporate addresses didnt fit his model of outlaws at 
all well.
	Why had he come all the way to Pinedale to investigate a crime he 
didnt understand which had taken place (sort of) in 5 different places, none 
of which was within 500 miles?
	Well, it seems Apple has told the FBI that they can expect little 
cooperation from Hackers in and around the Silicon Valley, owing to virulent 
anti-Apple sentiment there. They claim this is due to the Hacker belief that 
software should be free, combined with festering resentment of Apples 
commercial success. They advised the FBI to question only those Hackers 
who were as far as possible from the twisted heart of the subculture.
	They did have their eye on some local people though. These included a 
couple of former Apple employees, Grady Ward and Walter Horat, Chuck 
Farnham (who has made a living out of harassing Apple), Glenn Tenney (the 
purported leader of the Hackers), and, of course, the purported CEO of 
Autodesk.
	Other folks Agent Baxter asked me about included Mitch Kapor, who 
wrote Lotus 1-2-3 and was known to have received some this mysterious 
source code. Or whatever. But I had also met Mitch Kapor, both on the WELL 
and in person. A less likely computer terrorist would be hard to come by. 
	Actually, the question of the source code was another area where 
worlds but shadow-boxed. Although Agent Baxter didnt know source code 
from Tuesday, he did know that Apple Computer had told his agency that 
what had been stolen and disseminated was the complete recipe for a 
Macintosh computer. The distribution of this secret formula might result in 
the creation of millions of Macintoshes not made by Apple. And, of course, 
the ruination of Apple Computer. 
	In my world, NuPrometheus (whoever they, or more likely, he might 
be) had distributed a small portion of the code which related specifically to 
Color QuickDraw. QuickDraw is Apples name for the software which 
controls the Macs on-screen graphics. But this was another detail which 
Agent Baxter could not capture. For all he knew, you could grow 
Macintoshes from floppy disks. 
	I explained to him that Apple was alleging something like the ability to 
assemble an entire human being from the recipe for a foot, but even he knew 
the analogy was inexact. And trying to get him to accept the idea that a 
corporation could go mad with suspicion was quite futile. He had a far 
different perception of the emotional reliability of institutions.
	When he finally left, we were both dazzled and disturbed. I spent some 
time thinking about Lewis Carroll and tried to return to writing about the 
legal persecution of the Legion of Doom. But my heart wasnt in it. I found 
myself suddenly too much in sympathy with Agent Baxter and his struggling 
colleagues from Operation Sun Devil to get back into a proper sort of pig-
bashing mode. 
	Given what had happened to other innocent bystanders like Steve 
Jackson, I gave some thought to getting scared. But this was Kafka in a clown 
suit. It wasnt precisely frightening. I also took some comfort in a phrase once 
applied to the administration of Frederick the Great: Despotism tempered 
by incompetence. 
	Of course, incompetence is a double-edged banana. While we may 
know this new territory better than the authorities, they have us literally out-
gunned. One should pause before making well-armed paranoids feel foolish, 
no matter how foolish they seem. 
.c.
.c.
.c.The Fear of White Noise
.c.
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Sigmund Freud, 
appearing to me in a dream

I'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to divide 
	the human race into two kinds of people. My dividing line runs between 
the people who crave certainty and the people who trust chance. 
	You can draw this one a number of ways, of course, like Control vs. 
Serendipity, Order vs. Chaos, or Newton, Descartes & Aquinas vs. 
Heisenberg, Mandelbrot & the Dalai Lama, etc. 
	Large organizations and their drones huddle on one end of my scale, 
busily trying to impose predictable homogeneity on messy circumstance. On 
the other end, free-lancers and neer-do-wells cavort about, getting by on luck 
if they get by at all. 
	However you cast these poles, it comes down to the difference between 
those who see life as a struggle against cosmic peril and human infamy and 
those who believe, without any hard evidence, that the universe is actually on 
our side. Fear vs. Faith.
	I am of the latter group. Along with Gandhi and Rebecca of 
Sunnybrook Farm, I believe that other human beings will quite consistently 
merit my trust if Im not doing something which scares them or makes them 
feel bad about themselves. In other words, the best defense is a good way to 
get hurt. 
	In spite of the fact that this system works very reliably for me and my 
kind, I find we are increasingly in the minority. More and more of our 
neighbors live in armed compounds. Alarms blare continuously. Potentially 
happy people give their lives over to the corporate state as though the world 
were so dangerous outside its veil of collective immunity that they have no 
choice. 
	I have a number of theories as to why this is happening. One has to do 
with the opening of Cyberspace. As a result of this development, humanity is 
now undergoing the most profound transformation of its history. Coming 
into the Virtual World, we inhabit Information. Indeed, we become 
Information. Thought is embodied and the Flesh is made Word. Its weird as 
hell. 
	Beginning with the invention of the telegraph and extending through 
television into Virtual Reality, we have been, for a over a century, 
experiencing a terrifying erosion in our sense of both body and place. As we 
begin to realize the enormity of what is happening to us, all but the most 
courageous have gotten scared. 
	And everyone, regardless of his psychic resilience, feels this 
overwhelming sense of strangeness. The world, once so certain and tangible 
and legally precise, has become an infinite layering of opinions, perceptions, 
litigation, camera-angles, data, white noise, and, most of all, ambiguities. 
Those of us who are fearful do not like ambiguities. 
	Indeed, if one were a little jumpy to start with, he may now be fairly 
humming with nameless dread. Since no one likes his dread to be nameless, 
the first order of business is to find it some names.
	For a long time here in the United States, Communism provided a kind 
of catch-all bogeyman. Marx, Stalin and Mao summoned forth such a spectre 
that, to many Americans, annihilation of all life was preferable to the human 
portions becoming Communist. But as Big Red wizened and lost his teeth, we 
began to cast about for a replacement. 
	Finding none of sufficient individual horror, we have draped a number 
of objects with the old black bunting which once shrouded the Kremlin. Our 
current spooks are terrorists, child abductors, AIDS, and the underclass. I 
would say drugs, but anyone who thinks that the War on Drugs is not actually 
the War on the Underclass hasnt been paying close enough attention. 
	There are a couple of problems with these Four Horsemen. For one 
thing, they arent actually very dangerous. For example, only 7 Americans 
died in worldwide terrorist attacks in 1987. Fewer than 10 (out of about 70 
million) children are abducted by strangers in the U.S. each year. Your 
chances of getting AIDS if you are neither gay nor a hemophiliac nor a junkie 
are considerably less than your chances of getting killed by lightning while 
golfing. The underclass is dangerous, of course, but only, with very few 
exceptions, if you are a member of it.
	The other problem with these perils is that they are all physical. If we 
are entering into a world in which no one has a body, physical threats begin to 
lose their sting. 
	And now I come to the point of this screed: The perfect bogeyman 
for Modern Times is the Cyberpunk! He is so smart he makes you feel 
even more stupid than you usually do. He knows this complex country in 
which youre perpetually lost. He understands the value of things you cant 
conceptualize long enough to cash in on. He is the one-eyed man in the 
Country of the Blind.
	In a world where you and your wealth consist of nothing but beeps and 
boops of micro-voltage, he can steal all your assets in nanoseconds and then 
make you disappear. 
	He can even reach back out of his haunted mists and kill you 
physically. Among the justifications for Operation Sun Devil was this chilling 
tidbit:
	Hackers had the ability to access and review the files of hospital 
patients. Furthermore, they could have added, deleted, or altered vital 
patient information, possibly causing life-threatening situations. 
	Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Cyberpunk is the danger 
he presents to The Institution, whether corporate or governmental. If you are 
frightened, you have almost certainly taken shelter by now in one of these 
collective organisms, so the very last thing you want is something which can 
endanger your heretofore unassailable hive. 
	And make no mistake, crackers will become to bureaucratic bodies 
what viruses presently are to human bodies. Thus, Operation Sun Devil can 
be seen as the first of many waves of organizational immune response to this 
new antigen. Agent Baxter was a T-cell. Fortunately, he didnt know that 
himself and I was very careful not to show him my own antigenic tendencies.
	I think that herein lies the way out of what might otherwise become an 
Armageddon between the control freaks and the neo-hip. Those who are 
comfortable with these disorienting changes must do everything in our power 
to convey that comfort to others. In other words, we must share our sense of 
hope and opportunity with those who feel that in Cyberspace they will be 
obsolete eunuchs for sure.            
	Its a tall order. But, my silicon brothers, our self-interest is strong. If we 
come on as witches, they will burn us. If we volunteer to guide them gently 
into its new lands, the Virtual World might be a more amiable place for all of 
us than this one has been.
	Of course, we may also have to fight.

%%%%%%
 
Defining the conceptual and legal map of Cyberspace before the 
	ambiguophobes do it for us (with punitive over-precision) is going to 
require some effort. We cant expect the Constitution to take care of itself. 
Indeed, the precedent for mitigating the Constitutional protection of a new 
medium has already been established. Consider what happened to radio in 
the early part of this century.
	Under the pretext of allocating limited bandwidth, the government 
established an early right of censorship over broadcast content which still 
seems directly unconstitutional to me. Except that it stuck. And now, owing 
to a large body of case law, looks to go on sticking.
	New media, like any chaotic system, are highly sensitive to initial 
conditions. Todays heuristical answers of the moment become tomorrows 
permanent institutions of both law and expectation. Thus, they bear 
examination with that destiny in mind.
	Earlier in this article, I asked a number of tough questions relating to 
the nature of property, privacy, and speech in the digital domain. Questions 
like: What are data and what is free speech? or How does one treat 
property which has no physical form and can be infinitely reproduced? or 
Is a computer the same as a printing press? The events of Operation Sun 
Devil were nothing less than an effort to provide answers to these questions. 
Answers which would greatly enhance governmental ability to silence the 
futures opinionated nerds. 
	In over-reaching as extravagantly as they did, the Secret Service may 
actually have done a service for those of us who love liberty. They have 
provided us with a devil. And devils, among their other galvanizing virtues, 
are just great for clarifying the issues and putting iron in your spine. In the 
presence of a devil, its always easier to figure out where you stand. 
	While I previously had felt no stake in the obscure conundra of free 
telecommunication, I was, thanks to Operation Sun Devil, suddenly able to 
plot a trajectory from the current plight of the Legion of Doom to an eventual 
constraint on opinions much dearer to me. I remembered Martin Neimoeller, 
who said:
	In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didnt speak up 
because I wasnt a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didnt 
speak up because I wasnt a Jew.  They came for the trade unionists, and I 
didnt speak up because I wasnt a trade unionist.  Then they came for the 
Catholics, and I didnt speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came 
for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up. 
	I decided it was time for me to speak up. 
	The evening of my visit from Agent Baxter, I wrote an account of it 
which I placed on the WELL.  Several days later, Mitch Kapor literally 
dropped by for a chat. 
	Also a WELL denizen, he had read about Agent Baxter and had begun 
to meditate on the inappropriateness of leaving our civil liberties to be 
defined by the technologically benighted. A man who places great emphasis 
on face-to-face contact, he wanted to discuss this issue with me in person. He 
had been flying his Canadair bizjet to a meeting in California when he 
realized his route took him directly over Pinedale. 
	We talked for a couple of hours in my office while a spring snowstorm 
swirled outside. When I recounted for him what I had learned about 
Operation Sun Devil, he decided it was time for him to speak up, too.
	He called a few days later with the phone number of a civil libertarian 
named Harvey Silverglate, who, as evidence of his conviction that everyone 
deserves due process, is currently defending Leona Helmsley. Mitch asked 
me to tell Harvey what I knew, with the inference that he would help support 
the costs which are liable to arise whenever you tell a lawyer anything.
	I found Harvey in New York at the offices of that citys most 
distinguished constitutional law firm, Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, 
Krinsky, and Lieberman. These are the folks who made it possible for the New 
York Times to print the Pentagon Papers. (Not to dwell on the unwilling 
notoriety which partner Leonard Boudin achieved back in 1970 when his 
Weathergirl daughter blew up the family home....)
	In the conference call which followed, I could almost hear the skeletal 
click as their jaws dropped. The next day, Eric Lieberman and Terry Gross of 
Rabinowitz, Boudin met with Acid Phreak, Phiber Optik, and Scorpion.
	The maddening trouble with writing this account is that Whole Earth 
Review, unlike, say, Phrack, doesnt publish instantaneously. Events are 
boiling up at such a frothy pace that anything I say about current occurrences 
surely will not pertain by the time you read this. The road from here is certain 
to fork many times. The printed version of this will seem downright quaint 
before its dry.
	But as of today (in early June of 1990), Mitch and I are legally 
constituting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a two (or possibly three) man 
organization which will raise and disburse funds for education, lobbying, and 
litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of the 
Constitution into Cyberspace.
	Already, on the strength of preliminary stories about our efforts in the 
Washington Post and the New York Times, Mitch has received an offer from 
Steve Wozniak to match whatever funds he dedicates to this effort. (As well as 
a fair amount of abuse from the more institutionalized precincts of the 
computer industry.)
	The Electronic Frontier Foundation will 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. 
	In addition, we will work with the Computer Professionals for Social 
Responsibility and other organizations to convey to both the public and the 
policy-makers metaphors which will illuminate the more general stake in 
liberating Cyberspace. 
	Not everyone will agree. Crackers are, after all, generally beyond 
public sympathy. Actions on their behalf are not going to be popular no 
matter who else might benefit from them in the long run. 
	Nevertheless, in the litigations and political debates which are certain 
to follow, we will endeavor to assure that their electronic speech is protected 
as certainly as any opinions which are printed or, for that matter, screamed. 
We will make an effort to clarify issues surrounding the distribution of 
intellectual property. And we will help to create for America a future which 
is as blessed by the Bill of Rights as its past has been. -



-- John Perry Barlow
barlow@well.sf.ca.us
Friday, June 8, 1990 


Copyright 1990 by John Perry Barlow

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