Next

   25-Jun-1990 0:55a from Baliord 
CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT 
by
 
John Perry Barlow 
barlow@well.sf.ca.us
 
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 there's these 
two strangers riding into town.  They're young and got kind of a 
restless, bored way about 'em. 
 
A person don't need both eyes to see they mean trouble... Well, 
that wasn't 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 other's optik.
 
Barlow: Hmmm. What are their real names?
 
Howard: Check their finger files.
And so I typed !finger acid. Several seconds later the WELL's 
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 
corporealanalog 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, Harper's 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."
 
Harper's invited an odd lot of about 40 participants. These 
included: Clifford Stoll, whose book The Cuckoo's Egg details his 
cunning efforts to nab a German cracker. John Draper or "Cap'n 
Crunch," the grand-daddy 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 Air Force 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 Jeff Poskanzer. There was also 
a score of aging techno-hippies, the crackers, and me.
 
What I was doing there was not precisely clear since I've 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. I've always been more comfortable with 
outlaws than Republicans, despite having more certain 
credentials in the latter camp. 
 
But as the Harper's 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 didn't 
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, is currently 
serving 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 made a practice of destroying 
and altering data, including 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 
Dylan's 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 
                aren't, they should be.
 
Acid Phreak:    Yeah. Sure. And we should use the 'honor system' as a 
                first line of security against hack attempts.
 
Jef Poskanzer:  This guy down the street from me sometimes 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. 
 
                It's 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 Harper's 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:           Whoever said they'd 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 you're heading north on   
                Franklin, you go about two blocks off the main drag 
                before you run into hay meadow on the left. I've 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, you're not a 
                cyberpunk. You're 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 you've got a lesson to teach me, I hope it's n 
                that it's idiotic to trust one's fellow man. Life on those 
                terms would be endless and brutal. I'd try to tell you 
                something about conscience, but I'd sound like Father 
                O'Flannigan trying to reform the punk that's about to 
                gutshoot him. For no more reason that to watch him 
                die.
 
                But actually, if you take it upon yourself to destroy my 
                credit, you might do be a favor. I've been looking for 
                something to put the brakes on my burgeoning     
                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 alienation. Trade their modems for 
                skateboards and only a slight conceptual 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 didn't back off. 
 
I have since learned that while getting someone's 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, one's 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.
 
I've 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 WELL's 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 
wouldn't 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 there's little 
harm in him to man or data. His cracking impulses seemed 
purely exploratory, and I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't 
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 
I'd seen before: One becomes as he is beheld. They were simply 
living up to what they thought we, and, more particularly, the 
editors of Harper's, expected of them. Like the televised tears of 
disaster victims, their snarls adapted easily to mass distribution.   
 
Months later, Harper's 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 Harper's 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 VCR's. Copying a text file 
from TRW doesn't 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 
didn't 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 
don't 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 MP's held us for 
about 2 hours before letting us go. They weren't 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 can't see 
their eyes? How can one be sure that, like Mitnik, they won't 
cross the line from trespassing into another adolescent pastime, 
vandalism? And how can you be sure they pose no threat when 
you don't 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 they'll 
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 TRW's 
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 which 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.
 
  
 
 
 
 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 VI  
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 Acid's 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 Acid's 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 they'd chosen such a threatening name. "You 
wouldn't 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 South's 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 wasn't 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 Harper's 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 hacker's 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 affore-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 Pyncheon...
 
In addition to charging Knight Lightning with crimes for which 
he could go to jail 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, couldn't they as 
easily shut down 2600? 
 
He said, "I've 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 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 Lightning's 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 d  
istributed within businesses and universities for years was 
suddenly, in Rose's 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 wasn't 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. "I'm the one that found it, I'm the one 
that turned it in...And I'm the one that's suffering," he said. 
 
One wonders what will happen when they find such documents 
on the hard disks of CompuServe. Maybe I'll 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. 
It's 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 
Service's debonair new attitude toward the 4th Amendment's 
protection against unreasonable seizure.  
 
Early on March 1, 1990, the offices of a roll-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 
they're investigating, so we aren't likely to get it back any time 
soon. It could be a  month, it could be never."  It's 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 can't 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, there 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, that's just their 
tough luck."
 
In fact, Newsweek did run a story about the event, portraying it 
from Jackson's 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 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 raids, the game resided entirely 
on the hard disks they confiscated. Indeed, it was their target. 
They told Jackson that, based on its author's 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 Mentor's 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, it's a thing of such complexity that I 
can't swear there's no criminal information in there, but then I 
can't swear that Grateful Dead records don't have satanic 
messages if played backwards. Anything's 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 didn't 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 a 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 3 page 
Bell South document, the hackers had neither removed nor 
damaged anyone's 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 the kept the man's wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready 
to shoot and entered the bedroom of their sleeping 14 year old. 
Before leaving, the 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 capricious governmental seizure of 
circuitry. 
 
In fairness, one can imagine the government's problem. This is 
all pretty magical stuff to them. If I were trying to terminate the 
operations of a witch coven, I'd 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 
60's-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 I've 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.       
 
 
 
 
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 Nu  Prometheus 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 did not work for Apple any longer, might only do 
so again if encouraged with cattle prods. Apple's 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 leaned 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 didn't 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 wouldn't 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, isn't it" Or, "Whooo-ee." 
 
Or "my eight year old knows more about these things than I do." 
He didn't say this with a father's pride so much as an 
immigrant's 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 didn't 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.
 
You'd 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 Hacker's 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 affore-mentioned Cap'n Crunch, in addition 
to being a  known member of the Hacker's 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 wasn't making this up. He had lengthy documents from the 
San Francisco office to prove it. And in which Autodesk's 
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 Baxter's 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 Baxter's 
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. Didn't work. Then I tried to describe Virtual Reality to 
Agent Baxter, but that didn't work either. In fact, he tilted. I took 
several runs at it, but I could tell I was violating ou 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 Hacker's Conference. Hardly a 
conspiracy, the Hacker's 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 Hacker's 
Conference attendees and read their bios.   "These are the people 
who actually design this stuff, aren't they?" He was incredulous. 
Their corporate addresses didn't fit his model of outlaws at all 
well.
 
Why had he come all the way to Pinedale to investigate a crime 
he didn't 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 Apple's 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 
Water 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 didn't 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 Apple's 
name for the software which controls the Mac's on-screen 
McE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 know 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 wasn't 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 wasn't 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. 
 
   
 
 
 
The Fear of White Noise
 
 
"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, Hard answers vs. Silly 
questions, 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 ne'er-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 I'm 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. It's 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 of the 
fearful persuasion 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 portion's 
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 hasn't been paying close enough 
attention. 
 
There are a couple of problems with these Four Horsemen. For 
one thing, they aren't 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 you're perpetually lost. He 
understands the value of things you can't 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." [Emphasis added.] 
 
Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Cyberpunk is the 
tgb}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 didn't 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.            
 
It's 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 can't 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.  Today's heuristical answers of the moment 
become tomorrow's 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 future's 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, 
it's 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 didn't 
speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the 
Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. They came for 
the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade 
unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't 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 the 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 city's 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, doesn't publish 
instantaneously. Events are boiling up at such a frothy pace that 
anything I say about current occurrences surely will not obtain 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 it's dry. 
 
But as of today (in early June of 1990), Mitch and I are legally 
constituting the Computer Liberty 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 Computer Liberty 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  
 
 
 
------- End of Forwarded Message

<A>gain, <N>ext, <S>top -> 