don't have *any* human allegiances. They're not
black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or
pro-or-anti anything.
Godwin complained at length about what he
called "the Clever Hobbyist hypothesis" -- the
assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is
clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by
searched with extreme thoroughness. So: from the
law's point of view, why risk missing anything? Take
the works. Take the guy's computer. Take his books.
Take his notebooks. Take the electronic drafts of his
love letters. Take his Walkman. Take his wife's
computer. Take his dad's computer. Take his kid
sister's computer. Take his employer's computer.
Take his compact disks -- they *might* be CD-ROM
disks, cunningly disguised as pop music. Take his
laser printer -- he might have hidden something
vital in the printer's 5meg of memory. Take his
software manuals and hardware documentation.
Take his science-fiction novels and his simulation-
gaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and
his Pac-Man arcade game. Take his answering
machine, take his telephone out of the wall. Take
anything remotely suspicious.
Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not,
in fact, clever genius hobbyists. Quite a few are
crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way
of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb
rip-off techniques. The same goes for most fifteen-
year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning
program from a pirate board. There's no real need
to seize everything in sight. It doesn't require an
entire computer system and ten thousand disks to
prove a case in court.
What if the computer is the instrumentality of a
crime? someone demanded.
Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of
seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well
established in the American legal system.
The meeting broke up. Godwin and Kapor had
to leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before
the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility,
about ISDN narrowband wide-area networking.
As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed
elated. She had taken a great risk with this. Her
colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor and Godwin's
heads off. She was very proud of them, and told
them so.
"Did you hear what Godwin said about
*instrumentality of a crime?*" she exulted, to
nobody in particular. "Wow, that means *Mitch isn't
going to sue me.*"
#
America's computer police are an interesting
group. As a social phenomenon they are far more
interesting, and far more important, than teenage
phone phreaks and computer hackers. First, they're
older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky
morals, but seasoned adult professionals with all the
responsibilities of public service. And, unlike
hackers, they possess not merely *technical* power
alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.
And, very interestingly, they are just as much at
sea in cyberspace as everyone else. They are not
happy about this. Police are authoritarian by nature,
and prefer to obey rules and precedents. (Even
those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough
territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.)
But in cyberspace there *are* no rules and
precedents. They are groundbreaking pioneers,
Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.
In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by
computers, fascinated by the ins and outs of
computer security, and attracted by the lure of
specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do
well to forget all about "hacking" and set his (or her)
sights on becoming a fed. Feds can trump hackers
at almost every single thing hackers do, including
gathering intelligence, undercover disguise,
trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers,
networking, and infiltrating computer systems --
*criminal* computer systems. Secret Service agents
know more about phreaking, coding and carding
than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it
comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and
trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot
confidential information that is only vague rumor in
the underground.
And if it's an impressive public rep you're after,
there are few people in the world who can be so
chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed
United States Secret Service agent.
Of course, a few personal sacrifices are
necessary in order to obtain that power and
knowledge. First, you'll have the galling discipline of
belonging to a large organization; but the world of
computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly
fast-moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for
years to come. The second sacrifice is that you'll
have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great
loss. Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also
necessary, will be a boon to your health.
A career in computer security is not a bad
choice for a young man or woman today. The field
will almost certainly expand drastically in years to
come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you
become a professional, the pioneers you have read
about in this book will be the grand old men and
women of the field, swamped by their many
disciples and successors. Of course, some of them,
like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret Service,
may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of
legal controversy; but by the time you enter the
computer-crime field, it may have stabilized
somewhat, while remaining entertainingly
challenging.
But you can't just have a badge. You have to win
it. First, there's the federal law enforcement
training. And it's hard -- it's a challenge. A real
challenge -- not for wimps and rodents.
Every Secret Service agent must complete
gruelling courses at the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service agents are
periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)
In order to get a glimpse of what this might be
like, I myself travelled to FLETC.
#
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
is a 1500-acre facility on Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's
a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds, damp, clinging
sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats. Until
1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and still features a
working runway, and some WWII vintage
blockhouses and officers' quarters. The Center has
since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but
there's still enough forest and swamp on the facility
for the Border Patrol to put in tracking practice.
As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists. The nearest
real town is Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17,
where I stayed at the aptly named Marshview
Holiday Inn. I had Sunday dinner at a seafood
restaurant called "Jinright's," where I feasted on
deep-fried alligator tail. This local favorite was a
heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender,
almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming in a peppered
batter crust. Alligator makes a culinary experience
that's hard to forget, especially when liberally basted
with homemade cocktail sauce from a Jinright
squeeze-bottle.
The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen,
local black folks in their Sunday best, and white
Georgian locals who all seemed to bear an uncanny
resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard.
The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who
make up the FLETC population scarcely seem to
make a dent in the low-key local scene. The
students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to
have taken on much of the relaxed air of the Deep
South. My host was Mr. Carlton Fitzpatrick, the
Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud
Institute. Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy,
well-tanned Alabama native somewhere near his
late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco,
powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies.
We'd met before, at FCIC in Arizona.
The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine
divisions at FLETC. Besides Financial Fraud, there's
Driver & Marine, Firearms, and Physical Training.
These are specialized pursuits. There are also five
general training divisions: Basic Training,
Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal
Division, and Behavioral Science.
Somewhere in this curriculum is everything
necessary to turn green college graduates into
federal agents. First they're given ID cards. Then
they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls
known as "smurf suits." The trainees are assigned a
barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on
FLETC's bone-grinding physical training routine.
Besides the obligatory daily jogging -- (the trainers
run up danger flags beside the track when the
humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke) -
- there's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the
survival skills....
The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-
site academies at FLETC employ a wide variety of
specialized law enforcement units, some of them
rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal
Investigation Division, Park Service, Fish and
Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret Service and
the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions.... If you're a
federal cop and you don't work for the FBI, you train
at FLETC. This includes people as apparently
obscure as the agents of the Railroad Retirement
Board Inspector General. Or the Tennessee Valley
Authority Police, who are in fact federal police
officers, and can and do arrest criminals on the
federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
And then there are the computer-crime people.
All sorts, all backgrounds. Mr. Fitzpatrick is not
jealous of his specialized knowledge. Cops all over,
in every branch of service, may feel a need to learn
what he can teach. Backgrounds don't matter
much. Fitzpatrick himself was originally a Border
Patrol veteran, then became a Border Patrol
instructor at FLETC. His Spanish is still fluent -- but
he found himself strangely fascinated when the first
computers showed up at the Training Center.
Fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical
engineering, and though he never considered
himself a computer hacker, he somehow found
himself writing useful little programs for this new
and promising gizmo.
He began looking into the general subject of
computers and crime, reading Donn Parker's books
and articles, keeping an ear cocked for war stories,
useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming
people of the local computer-crime and high-
technology units.... Soon he got a reputation around
FLETC as the resident "computer expert," and that
reputation alone brought him more exposure, more
experience -- until one day he looked around, and
sure enough he *was* a federal computer-crime
expert.
In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be
*the* federal computer-crime expert. There are
plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of
very good federal investigators, but the area where
these worlds of expertise overlap is very slim. And
Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of
that since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group
which owes much to his influence.
He seems quite at home in his modest,
acoustic-tiled office, with its Ansel Adams-style
Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior
Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase
crammed with three-ring binders with ominous titles
such as *Datapro Reports on Information Security*
and *CFCA Telecom Security '90.*
The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues
show up at the door to chat about new developments
in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the
latest dismal developments in the BCCI global
banking scandal.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime
war-stories, related in an acerbic drawl. He tells me
the colorful tale of a hacker caught in California
some years back. He'd been raiding systems,
typing code without a detectable break, for twenty,
twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight. Not just logged
on -- *typing.* Investigators were baffled. Nobody
could do that. Didn't he have to go to the bathroom?
Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking
device that could actually type code?
A raid on the suspect's home revealed a
situation of astonishing squalor. The hacker turned
out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who
had flunked out of a California university. He'd
gone completely underground as an illegal
electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone-
service to stay alive. The place was not merely
messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder.
Powered by some weird mix of culture shock,
computer addiction, and amphetamines, the
suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his
computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks
and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a
chamber-pot under his chair.
Word about stuff like this gets around in the
hacker-tracker community.
Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour
by car around the FLETC grounds. One of our first
sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world.
There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick
assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety
of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s.... He's
willing to take me inside. I tell him I'm sure that's
really interesting, but I'd rather see his computers.
Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and
pleased. I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever
seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in
favor of microchips.
Our next stop is a favorite with touring
Congressmen: the three-mile long FLETC driving
range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine
Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting
and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic security
driving for VIP limousines.... A favorite FLETC
pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the
passenger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit
a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the
skid-pan," a section of greased track where two tons
of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.
Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're
rifled again and again for search practice. Then they
do 25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit training; they
get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted
radials. Then it's off to the skid pan, where
sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the
grease. When they're sufficiently grease-stained,
dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock
unit, where they're battered without pity. And finally
then they're sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins
and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into
smoking wreckage.
There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC
grounds, and a large grounded boat, and a propless
plane; all training-grounds for searches. The plane
sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an
eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound,"
where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage
rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern
low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a
sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire,
somewhere in the woods to my right. "Nine-
millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.
Even the eldritch ninja compound pales
somewhat compared to the truly surreal area known
as "the raid-houses." This is a street lined on both
sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with
flat pebbled roofs. They were once officers' quarters.
Now they are training grounds. The first one to our
left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted
for computer search-and-seizure practice. Inside it
has been wired for video from top to bottom, with
eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely controlled
videocams mounted on walls and in corners. Every
movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by
teachers, for later taped analysis. Wasted
movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical
mistakes -- all are gone over in detail.
Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this
building is its front door, scarred and scuffed all
along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day
after day, of federal shoe-leather.
Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses
some people are practicing a murder. We drive by
slowly as some very young and rather nervous-
looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald
man on the raid-house lawn. Dealing with murder
takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to
control your own instinctive disgust and panic, then
you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve-
shredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may
have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be
murderers -- quite possibly both at once.
A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the
bereaved, the morbidly curious, and the homicidal
are played, for pay, by local Georgians: waitresses,
musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight
and can learn a script. These people, some of whom
are FLETC regulars year after year, must surely have
one of the strangest jobs in the world.
Something about the scene: "normal" people in
a weird situation, standing around talking in bright
Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully pretending that
something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies
inside on faked bloodstains.... While behind this
weird masquerade, like a nested set of Russian dolls,
are grim future realities of real death, real violence,
real murders of real people, that these young agents
will really investigate, many times during their
careers.... Over and over.... Will those anticipated
murders look like this, feel like this -- not as "real" as
these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but
both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching
fake people standing around on a fake lawn?
Something about this scene unhinges me. It seems
nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't
know how to take it; my head is turned around; I
don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.
When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I
talk about computers. For the first time cyberspace
seems like quite a comfortable place. It seems very
real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm
talking about, a place I'm used to. It's real. "Real."
Whatever.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in
cyberspace circles who is happy with his present
equipment. He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with a 112
meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a
Compaq 386 desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with
120 meg. Down the hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A with
a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four
com-lines. There's a training minicomputer, and a
10-meg local mini just for the Center, and a lab-full
of student PC clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so.
There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on
board and a 370 meg disk.
Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the
Data General when he's finished beta-testing the
software for it, which he wrote himself. It'll have E-
mail features, massive files on all manner of
computer-crime and investigation procedures, and
will follow the computer-security specifics of the
Department of Defense "Orange Book." He thinks
it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government.
Will it have *Phrack* on it? I ask wryly.
Sure, he tells me. *Phrack,* *TAP,* *Computer
Underground Digest,* all that stuff. With proper
disclaimers, of course.
I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a
system that size is very time-consuming, and
Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every
day.
No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its
money worth out of the instructors. He thinks he
can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school
student.
He says a bit more, something I think about an
Eagle Scout law-enforcement liaison program, but
my mind has rocketed off in disbelief.
"You're going to put a *teenager* in charge of a
federal security BBS?" I'm speechless. It hasn't
escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial Fraud
Institute is the *ultimate* hacker-trashing target;
there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and
consummate cool by every standard of the digital
underground.... I imagine the hackers of my
acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-
knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of
cracking the superultra top-secret computers used
to train the Secret Service in computer-crime....
"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really
nice kid and all, but that's a terrible temptation to
set in front of somebody who's, you know, into
computers and just starting out..."
"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the
first time I begin to suspect that he's pulling my leg.
He seems proudest when he shows me an
ongoing project called JICC, Joint Intelligence
Control Council. It's based on the services provided
by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which
supplies data and intelligence to the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service,
the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four
southern border states. Certain EPIC files can now
be accessed by drug-enforcement police of Central
America, South America and the Caribbean, who
can also trade information among themselves.
Using a telecom program called "White Hat,"
written by two brothers named Lopez from the
Dominican Republic, police can now network
internationally on inexpensive PCs. Carlton
Fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war agents
from the Third World, and he's very proud of their
progress. Perhaps soon the sophisticated
smuggling networks of the Medellin Cartel will be
matched by a sophisticated computer network of the
Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies. They'll track
boats, track contraband, track the international
drug-lords who now leap over borders with great
ease, defeating the police through the clever use of
fragmented national jurisdictions.
JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope
of this book. They seem to me to be very large
topics fraught with complications that I am not fit to
judge. I do know, however, that the international,
computer-assisted networking of police, across
national boundaries, is something that Carlton
Fitzpatrick considers very important, a harbinger of
a desirable future. I also know that networks by their
nature ignore physical boundaries. And I also know
that where you put communications you put a
community, and that when those communities
become self-aware they will fight to preserve
themselves and to expand their influence. I make
no judgements whether this is good or bad. It's just
cyberspace; it's just the way things are.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he
would have for a twenty-year-old who wanted to
shine someday in the world of electronic law
enforcement.
He told me that the number one rule was
simply not to be scared of computers. You don't
need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but you
mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine
looks fancy. The advantages computers give smart
crooks are matched by the advantages they give
smart cops. Cops in the future will have to enforce
the law "with their heads, not their holsters." Today
you can make good cases without ever leaving your
office. In the future, cops who resist the computer
revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single
message for the public; some single thing that he
would most like the American public to know about
his work.
He thought about it while. "Yes," he said finally.
"*Tell* me the rules, and I'll *teach* those rules!" He
looked me straight in the eye. "I do the best that I
can."
The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have
followed it thus far, has been technological, subcultural,
criminal and legal. The story of the Civil Libertarians,
though it partakes of all those other aspects, is profoundly
and thoroughly *political.*
In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over
the ownership and nature of cyberspace became loudly
and irretrievably public. People from some of the oddest
corners of American society suddenly found themselves
public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They
backpedalled, and tried to retreat back to the mandarin
obscurity of their cozy subcultural niches. This was
generally to prove a mistake.
But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990.
They
found themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-
pounding, persuading, touring, negotiating, posing for
publicity photos, submitting to interviews, squinting in the
limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly
sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.
It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should
have this competitive advantage.
The hackers of the digital underground are an
hermetic elite. They find it hard to make any remotely
convincing case for their actions in front of the general
public. Actually, hackers roundly despise the "ignorant"
public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the
system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among
themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of
class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism.
Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and
preserve their underground reputations. But if they speak
out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile
surface-tension of the underground, and they will be
harrassed or arrested. Over the longer term, most
hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give
up. As a political force, the digital underground is
hamstrung.
The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under
protracted seige. They have plenty of money with which to
push their calculated public image, but they waste much
energy and goodwill attacking one another with
slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos
have suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers,
they don't trust the public's judgement. And this distrust
may be well-founded. Should the general public of the
high-tech 1990s come to understand its own best interests
in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave
threat to the specialized technical power and authority
that the telcos have relished for over a century. The
telcos do have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized
expertise, influence in the halls of power, tactical allies
in law enforcement, and unbelievably vast amounts of
money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine
grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many
friends.
Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.
But cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their
knowledge that they feel will meet their institutional
purposes and further public order. Cops have respect,
they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets
and even power in the home, but cops don't do
particularly well in limelight. When pressed, they will
step out in the public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to
cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the
naive and misguided. But then they go back within their
time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom
and the rule-book.
The electronic civil libertarians, however, have
proven to be born political animals. They seemed to
grasp very early on the postmodern truism that
communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public
agenda -- and *keep it there* -- is power. Fame is power.
Simple personal fluency and eloquence can be power, if
you can somehow catch the public's eye and ear.
The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical
power" -- though they all owned computers, most were not
particularly advanced computer experts. They had a good
deal of money, but nowhere near the earthshaking wealth
and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or federal
agencies. They had no ability to arrest people. They
carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.
But they really knew how to network.
Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil
libertarians have operated very much in the open, more or
less right in the public hurly-burly. They have lectured
audiences galore and talked to countless journalists, and
have learned to refine their spiels. They've kept the
cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped
that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked
envelopes and spent small fortunes on airfare and long-
distance. In an information society, this open, overt,
obvious activity has proven to be a profound advantage.
In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace
assembled out of nowhere in particular, at warp speed.
This "group" (actually, a networking gaggle of interested
parties which scarcely deserves even that loose term) has
almost nothing in the way of formal organization. Those
formal civil libertarian organizations which did take an
interest in cyberspace issues, mainly the Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility and the American
Civil Liberties Union, were carried along by events in 1990,
and acted mostly as adjuncts, underwriters or launching-
pads.
The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the
greatest success of any of the groups in the Crackdown of
1990. At this writing, their future looks rosy and the
political initiative is firmly in their hands. This should
be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives and
lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.
#
In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino,
California, had a problem. Someone had illicitly copied a
small piece of Apple's proprietary software, software which
controlled an internal chip driving the Macintosh screen
display. This Color QuickDraw source code was a closely
guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property. Only
trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.
But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things
otherwise. This person (or persons) made several illicit
copies of this source code, perhaps as many as two dozen.
He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks
into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:
people in the computer industry who were associated with,
but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.
The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly
ideological, and very hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it
will be recalled, stole the fire of the Gods and gave this
potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden mankind.
A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the
corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu"
Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod.
The illicitly copied data was given away for free.
The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the
fate of the ancient Greek Prometheus, who was chained to
a rock for centuries by the vengeful gods while an eagle
tore and ate his liver. On the other hand, NuPrometheus
chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role
model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had
filched and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's
industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else). Instead
of giving fire to mankind, it was more as if NuPrometheus
had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic lighter.
The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. It
was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the
face for the Apple corporate heirarchy.
Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the
industry. Apple's founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both
taken their leave long since. Their raucous core of senior
employees had been a barnstorming crew of 1960s
Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with
the new button-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple.
Many of the programmers and developers who had
invented the Macintosh model in the early 1980s had also
taken their leave of the company. It was they, not the
current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had
invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The
NuPrometheus stunt was well-calculated to wound
company morale.
Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in
high-profile intellectual-property theft cases, industrial
espionage and theft of trade secrets. These were likely
the right people to call, and rumor has it that the entities
responsible were in fact discovered by the FBI, and then
quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus
was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or
jailed. But there were no further illicit releases of
Macintosh internal software. Eventually the painful issue
of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.
In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled
bystanders found themselves entertaining surprise guests
from the FBI.
One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow
is a most unusual man, difficult to describe in
conventional terms. He is perhaps best known as a
songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics
for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues,"
"I Need a Miracle," and many more; he has been writing
for the band since 1970.
Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock
lyricist should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer-
crime case, it might be well to say a word or two about the
Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most
successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural
emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San
Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and
lysergic transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a
veritable whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans,
tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and
open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the
realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful
Dead like knotted macrame.
The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead
devotees are radical Bohemians. This much is widely
understood. Exactly what this implies in the 1990s is
rather more problematic.
The Grateful Dead are among the world's most
popular and wealthy entertainers: number 20, according
to *Forbes* magazine, right between M.C. Hammer and
Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of purported
raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. They
have been earning sums much along this line for quite
some time now.
And while the Dead are not investment bankers or
three-piece-suit tax specialists -- they are, in point of
fact,
hippie musicians -- this money has not been squandered
in senseless Bohemian excess. The Dead have been
quietly active for many years, funding various worthy
activities in their extensive and widespread cultural
community.
The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in
the American power establishment. They nevertheless
are something of a force to be reckoned with. They have a
lot of money and a lot of friends in many places, both
likely and unlikely.
The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth
environmentalist rhetoric, but this hardly makes them
anti-technological Luddites. On the contrary, like most
rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their entire
adult lives in the company of complex electronic
equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated
tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy. And
their fancy is quite extensive.
The Deadhead community boasts any number of
recording engineers, lighting experts, rock video mavens,
electronic technicians of all descriptions. And the drift
goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, used
to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.
These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a
surprising number of people all over America, the
supposed dividing line between Bohemian and technician
simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set
of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its
neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte
Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy
fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary
himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-
graphics demos in his lecture tours.
John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful
Dead. He is, however, a ranking Deadhead.
Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A
vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the
mark, either. But Barlow might be better described as a
"poet" -- if one keeps in mind Percy Shelley's archaic
definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the
world."
Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator
status. In 1987, he narrowly missed the Republican
nomination for a seat in the Wyoming State Senate.
Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of
a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early
forties, married and the father of three daughters.
Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow
notions of consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican
rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch and became a
computer telecommunications devotee.
The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with
ease. He genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of
his modem, he leapt from small-town Pinedale, Wyoming,
into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd of
bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over
the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing
attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its
open-
endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer
journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study,
and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to
San Francisco to network with Deadhead friends. There
Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the
Californian computer community, including friendships
among the wilder spirits at Apple.
In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local
Wyoming agent of the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had
reached Wyoming.
Barlow was troubled to find himself under
investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of
federal attention. He had to struggle to explain the very
nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local FBI
man who specialized in cattle-rustling. Barlow, chatting
helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to
the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers"
generally under FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the
electronic community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker
called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a
suspect group called the Hackers Conference.
The Hackers Conference, which had been started in
1984, was a yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers
and enthusiasts. The hackers of the Hackers Conference
had little if anything to do with the hackers of the digital
underground. On the contrary, the hackers of this
conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech
CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This
group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers" most
likely to react with militant fury at any criminal
degradation of the term "hacker.")
Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a
crime, and though his computer had certainly not gone
out the door, was very troubled by this anomaly. He
carried the word to the Well.
Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an
emanation of the Point Foundation. Point Foundation,
the inspiration of a wealthy Californian 60s radical named
Stewart Brand, was to be a major launch-pad of the civil
libertarian effort.
Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of
their
fellow Bay Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were
multifaceted and multitudinous. Rigid ideological
consistency had never been a strong suit of the *Whole
Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed a
strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it
offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on
communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting
back-to-the-land. The *Whole Earth Catalog,* and its
sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a
National Book Award.
With the slow collapse of American radical dissent,
the *Whole Earth Catalog* had slipped to a more modest
corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine
incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point
Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of
"access to tools and ideas."
*CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was
never a widely popular magazine. Despite periodic
outbreaks of millenarian fervor, *CoEvolution Quarterly*
failed to revolutionize Western civilization and replace
leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian
paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point
Foundation cakewalked a fine line between impressive
brilliance and New Age flakiness. *CoEvolution
Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came out
on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white
graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by
subscription and word of mouth.
It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers.
And yet -- it never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in,
year out, decade in, decade out, some strange
demographic minority accreted to support the magazine.
The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in
the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes
hard to understand what held them together (if the often
bitter debate in the letter-columns could be described as
"togetherness").
But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient;
it
got by. Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh
computer, *CoEvolution Quarterly* suddenly hit the
rapids. Point Foundation had discovered the computer
revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog*
of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-
dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent
"cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point
Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and
began to take an extensive interest in the strange new
possibilities of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution
Quarterly* folded its teepee, replaced by *Whole Earth
Software Review* and eventually by *Whole Earth
Review* (the magazine's present incarnation, currently
under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard
Rheingold).
1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link." The Well was Point Foundation's
bulletin board system.
As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the
beginning, and remained one. It was local to San
Francisco. It was huge, with multiple phonelines and
enormous files of commentary. Its complex UNIX-based
software might be most charitably described as "user-
opaque." It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling
offices of a non-profit cultural foundation in Sausalito.
And it was crammed with fans of the Grateful Dead.
Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters
of the Bay Area counterculture, it was by no means a
"digital underground" board. Teenagers were fairly
scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings") were
thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended
to work in the information industry: hardware, software,
telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians,
academics, and journalists were especially common on
the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's open-handed
distribution of "tools and ideas."
There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a
dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft. No
one used handles. Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a
comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were sometimes
sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had
disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his
credit card numbers.
The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It
charged a modest sum for access and storage, and lost
money for years -- but not enough to hamper the Point
Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the
Well had about five thousand users. These users
wandered about a gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of
"Conferences", each conference itself consisting of a
welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens,
sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling,
multiperson debate that could last for months or years on
end.
In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like
this:
CONFERENCES ON THE WELL
WELL "Screenzine" Digest (g zine)
Best of the WELL - vintage material -
(g best)
Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g
newtops)
Business - Education
----------------------
Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds
(g cla)
Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons) Design
(g design)
Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g
disability)
Education (g ed) Energy
(g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g
home)
Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g
invest)
Kids91 (g kids) Legal
(g legal)
One Person Business (g one)
Periodical/newsletter(g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future
(g fut)
Translators (g trans) Travel
(g tra)
Work (g work)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)
black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or
pro-or-anti anything.
Godwin complained at length about what he
called "the Clever Hobbyist hypothesis" -- the
assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is
clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by
searched with extreme thoroughness. So: from the
law's point of view, why risk missing anything? Take
the works. Take the guy's computer. Take his books.
Take his notebooks. Take the electronic drafts of his
love letters. Take his Walkman. Take his wife's
computer. Take his dad's computer. Take his kid
sister's computer. Take his employer's computer.
Take his compact disks -- they *might* be CD-ROM
disks, cunningly disguised as pop music. Take his
laser printer -- he might have hidden something
vital in the printer's 5meg of memory. Take his
software manuals and hardware documentation.
Take his science-fiction novels and his simulation-
gaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and
his Pac-Man arcade game. Take his answering
machine, take his telephone out of the wall. Take
anything remotely suspicious.
Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not,
in fact, clever genius hobbyists. Quite a few are
crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way
of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb
rip-off techniques. The same goes for most fifteen-
year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning
program from a pirate board. There's no real need
to seize everything in sight. It doesn't require an
entire computer system and ten thousand disks to
prove a case in court.
What if the computer is the instrumentality of a
crime? someone demanded.
Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of
seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well
established in the American legal system.
The meeting broke up. Godwin and Kapor had
to leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before
the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility,
about ISDN narrowband wide-area networking.
As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed
elated. She had taken a great risk with this. Her
colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor and Godwin's
heads off. She was very proud of them, and told
them so.
"Did you hear what Godwin said about
*instrumentality of a crime?*" she exulted, to
nobody in particular. "Wow, that means *Mitch isn't
going to sue me.*"
#
America's computer police are an interesting
group. As a social phenomenon they are far more
interesting, and far more important, than teenage
phone phreaks and computer hackers. First, they're
older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky
morals, but seasoned adult professionals with all the
responsibilities of public service. And, unlike
hackers, they possess not merely *technical* power
alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.
And, very interestingly, they are just as much at
sea in cyberspace as everyone else. They are not
happy about this. Police are authoritarian by nature,
and prefer to obey rules and precedents. (Even
those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough
territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.)
But in cyberspace there *are* no rules and
precedents. They are groundbreaking pioneers,
Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.
In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by
computers, fascinated by the ins and outs of
computer security, and attracted by the lure of
specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do
well to forget all about "hacking" and set his (or her)
sights on becoming a fed. Feds can trump hackers
at almost every single thing hackers do, including
gathering intelligence, undercover disguise,
trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers,
networking, and infiltrating computer systems --
*criminal* computer systems. Secret Service agents
know more about phreaking, coding and carding
than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it
comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and
trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot
confidential information that is only vague rumor in
the underground.
And if it's an impressive public rep you're after,
there are few people in the world who can be so
chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed
United States Secret Service agent.
Of course, a few personal sacrifices are
necessary in order to obtain that power and
knowledge. First, you'll have the galling discipline of
belonging to a large organization; but the world of
computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly
fast-moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for
years to come. The second sacrifice is that you'll
have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great
loss. Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also
necessary, will be a boon to your health.
A career in computer security is not a bad
choice for a young man or woman today. The field
will almost certainly expand drastically in years to
come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you
become a professional, the pioneers you have read
about in this book will be the grand old men and
women of the field, swamped by their many
disciples and successors. Of course, some of them,
like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret Service,
may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of
legal controversy; but by the time you enter the
computer-crime field, it may have stabilized
somewhat, while remaining entertainingly
challenging.
But you can't just have a badge. You have to win
it. First, there's the federal law enforcement
training. And it's hard -- it's a challenge. A real
challenge -- not for wimps and rodents.
Every Secret Service agent must complete
gruelling courses at the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service agents are
periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)
In order to get a glimpse of what this might be
like, I myself travelled to FLETC.
#
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
is a 1500-acre facility on Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's
a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds, damp, clinging
sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats. Until
1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and still features a
working runway, and some WWII vintage
blockhouses and officers' quarters. The Center has
since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but
there's still enough forest and swamp on the facility
for the Border Patrol to put in tracking practice.
As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists. The nearest
real town is Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17,
where I stayed at the aptly named Marshview
Holiday Inn. I had Sunday dinner at a seafood
restaurant called "Jinright's," where I feasted on
deep-fried alligator tail. This local favorite was a
heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender,
almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming in a peppered
batter crust. Alligator makes a culinary experience
that's hard to forget, especially when liberally basted
with homemade cocktail sauce from a Jinright
squeeze-bottle.
The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen,
local black folks in their Sunday best, and white
Georgian locals who all seemed to bear an uncanny
resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard.
The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who
make up the FLETC population scarcely seem to
make a dent in the low-key local scene. The
students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to
have taken on much of the relaxed air of the Deep
South. My host was Mr. Carlton Fitzpatrick, the
Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud
Institute. Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy,
well-tanned Alabama native somewhere near his
late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco,
powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies.
We'd met before, at FCIC in Arizona.
The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine
divisions at FLETC. Besides Financial Fraud, there's
Driver & Marine, Firearms, and Physical Training.
These are specialized pursuits. There are also five
general training divisions: Basic Training,
Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal
Division, and Behavioral Science.
Somewhere in this curriculum is everything
necessary to turn green college graduates into
federal agents. First they're given ID cards. Then
they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls
known as "smurf suits." The trainees are assigned a
barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on
FLETC's bone-grinding physical training routine.
Besides the obligatory daily jogging -- (the trainers
run up danger flags beside the track when the
humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke) -
- there's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the
survival skills....
The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-
site academies at FLETC employ a wide variety of
specialized law enforcement units, some of them
rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal
Investigation Division, Park Service, Fish and
Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret Service and
the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions.... If you're a
federal cop and you don't work for the FBI, you train
at FLETC. This includes people as apparently
obscure as the agents of the Railroad Retirement
Board Inspector General. Or the Tennessee Valley
Authority Police, who are in fact federal police
officers, and can and do arrest criminals on the
federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
And then there are the computer-crime people.
All sorts, all backgrounds. Mr. Fitzpatrick is not
jealous of his specialized knowledge. Cops all over,
in every branch of service, may feel a need to learn
what he can teach. Backgrounds don't matter
much. Fitzpatrick himself was originally a Border
Patrol veteran, then became a Border Patrol
instructor at FLETC. His Spanish is still fluent -- but
he found himself strangely fascinated when the first
computers showed up at the Training Center.
Fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical
engineering, and though he never considered
himself a computer hacker, he somehow found
himself writing useful little programs for this new
and promising gizmo.
He began looking into the general subject of
computers and crime, reading Donn Parker's books
and articles, keeping an ear cocked for war stories,
useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming
people of the local computer-crime and high-
technology units.... Soon he got a reputation around
FLETC as the resident "computer expert," and that
reputation alone brought him more exposure, more
experience -- until one day he looked around, and
sure enough he *was* a federal computer-crime
expert.
In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be
*the* federal computer-crime expert. There are
plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of
very good federal investigators, but the area where
these worlds of expertise overlap is very slim. And
Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of
that since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group
which owes much to his influence.
He seems quite at home in his modest,
acoustic-tiled office, with its Ansel Adams-style
Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior
Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase
crammed with three-ring binders with ominous titles
such as *Datapro Reports on Information Security*
and *CFCA Telecom Security '90.*
The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues
show up at the door to chat about new developments
in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the
latest dismal developments in the BCCI global
banking scandal.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime
war-stories, related in an acerbic drawl. He tells me
the colorful tale of a hacker caught in California
some years back. He'd been raiding systems,
typing code without a detectable break, for twenty,
twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight. Not just logged
on -- *typing.* Investigators were baffled. Nobody
could do that. Didn't he have to go to the bathroom?
Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking
device that could actually type code?
A raid on the suspect's home revealed a
situation of astonishing squalor. The hacker turned
out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who
had flunked out of a California university. He'd
gone completely underground as an illegal
electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone-
service to stay alive. The place was not merely
messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder.
Powered by some weird mix of culture shock,
computer addiction, and amphetamines, the
suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his
computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks
and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a
chamber-pot under his chair.
Word about stuff like this gets around in the
hacker-tracker community.
Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour
by car around the FLETC grounds. One of our first
sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world.
There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick
assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety
of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s.... He's
willing to take me inside. I tell him I'm sure that's
really interesting, but I'd rather see his computers.
Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and
pleased. I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever
seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in
favor of microchips.
Our next stop is a favorite with touring
Congressmen: the three-mile long FLETC driving
range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine
Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting
and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic security
driving for VIP limousines.... A favorite FLETC
pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the
passenger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit
a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the
skid-pan," a section of greased track where two tons
of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.
Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're
rifled again and again for search practice. Then they
do 25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit training; they
get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted
radials. Then it's off to the skid pan, where
sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the
grease. When they're sufficiently grease-stained,
dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock
unit, where they're battered without pity. And finally
then they're sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins
and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into
smoking wreckage.
There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC
grounds, and a large grounded boat, and a propless
plane; all training-grounds for searches. The plane
sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an
eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound,"
where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage
rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern
low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a
sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire,
somewhere in the woods to my right. "Nine-
millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.
Even the eldritch ninja compound pales
somewhat compared to the truly surreal area known
as "the raid-houses." This is a street lined on both
sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with
flat pebbled roofs. They were once officers' quarters.
Now they are training grounds. The first one to our
left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted
for computer search-and-seizure practice. Inside it
has been wired for video from top to bottom, with
eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely controlled
videocams mounted on walls and in corners. Every
movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by
teachers, for later taped analysis. Wasted
movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical
mistakes -- all are gone over in detail.
Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this
building is its front door, scarred and scuffed all
along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day
after day, of federal shoe-leather.
Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses
some people are practicing a murder. We drive by
slowly as some very young and rather nervous-
looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald
man on the raid-house lawn. Dealing with murder
takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to
control your own instinctive disgust and panic, then
you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve-
shredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may
have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be
murderers -- quite possibly both at once.
A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the
bereaved, the morbidly curious, and the homicidal
are played, for pay, by local Georgians: waitresses,
musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight
and can learn a script. These people, some of whom
are FLETC regulars year after year, must surely have
one of the strangest jobs in the world.
Something about the scene: "normal" people in
a weird situation, standing around talking in bright
Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully pretending that
something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies
inside on faked bloodstains.... While behind this
weird masquerade, like a nested set of Russian dolls,
are grim future realities of real death, real violence,
real murders of real people, that these young agents
will really investigate, many times during their
careers.... Over and over.... Will those anticipated
murders look like this, feel like this -- not as "real" as
these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but
both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching
fake people standing around on a fake lawn?
Something about this scene unhinges me. It seems
nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't
know how to take it; my head is turned around; I
don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.
When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I
talk about computers. For the first time cyberspace
seems like quite a comfortable place. It seems very
real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm
talking about, a place I'm used to. It's real. "Real."
Whatever.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in
cyberspace circles who is happy with his present
equipment. He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with a 112
meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a
Compaq 386 desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with
120 meg. Down the hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A with
a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four
com-lines. There's a training minicomputer, and a
10-meg local mini just for the Center, and a lab-full
of student PC clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so.
There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on
board and a 370 meg disk.
Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the
Data General when he's finished beta-testing the
software for it, which he wrote himself. It'll have E-
mail features, massive files on all manner of
computer-crime and investigation procedures, and
will follow the computer-security specifics of the
Department of Defense "Orange Book." He thinks
it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government.
Will it have *Phrack* on it? I ask wryly.
Sure, he tells me. *Phrack,* *TAP,* *Computer
Underground Digest,* all that stuff. With proper
disclaimers, of course.
I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a
system that size is very time-consuming, and
Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every
day.
No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its
money worth out of the instructors. He thinks he
can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school
student.
He says a bit more, something I think about an
Eagle Scout law-enforcement liaison program, but
my mind has rocketed off in disbelief.
"You're going to put a *teenager* in charge of a
federal security BBS?" I'm speechless. It hasn't
escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial Fraud
Institute is the *ultimate* hacker-trashing target;
there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and
consummate cool by every standard of the digital
underground.... I imagine the hackers of my
acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-
knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of
cracking the superultra top-secret computers used
to train the Secret Service in computer-crime....
"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really
nice kid and all, but that's a terrible temptation to
set in front of somebody who's, you know, into
computers and just starting out..."
"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the
first time I begin to suspect that he's pulling my leg.
He seems proudest when he shows me an
ongoing project called JICC, Joint Intelligence
Control Council. It's based on the services provided
by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which
supplies data and intelligence to the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service,
the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four
southern border states. Certain EPIC files can now
be accessed by drug-enforcement police of Central
America, South America and the Caribbean, who
can also trade information among themselves.
Using a telecom program called "White Hat,"
written by two brothers named Lopez from the
Dominican Republic, police can now network
internationally on inexpensive PCs. Carlton
Fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war agents
from the Third World, and he's very proud of their
progress. Perhaps soon the sophisticated
smuggling networks of the Medellin Cartel will be
matched by a sophisticated computer network of the
Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies. They'll track
boats, track contraband, track the international
drug-lords who now leap over borders with great
ease, defeating the police through the clever use of
fragmented national jurisdictions.
JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope
of this book. They seem to me to be very large
topics fraught with complications that I am not fit to
judge. I do know, however, that the international,
computer-assisted networking of police, across
national boundaries, is something that Carlton
Fitzpatrick considers very important, a harbinger of
a desirable future. I also know that networks by their
nature ignore physical boundaries. And I also know
that where you put communications you put a
community, and that when those communities
become self-aware they will fight to preserve
themselves and to expand their influence. I make
no judgements whether this is good or bad. It's just
cyberspace; it's just the way things are.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he
would have for a twenty-year-old who wanted to
shine someday in the world of electronic law
enforcement.
He told me that the number one rule was
simply not to be scared of computers. You don't
need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but you
mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine
looks fancy. The advantages computers give smart
crooks are matched by the advantages they give
smart cops. Cops in the future will have to enforce
the law "with their heads, not their holsters." Today
you can make good cases without ever leaving your
office. In the future, cops who resist the computer
revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single
message for the public; some single thing that he
would most like the American public to know about
his work.
He thought about it while. "Yes," he said finally.
"*Tell* me the rules, and I'll *teach* those rules!" He
looked me straight in the eye. "I do the best that I
can."
The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have
followed it thus far, has been technological, subcultural,
criminal and legal. The story of the Civil Libertarians,
though it partakes of all those other aspects, is profoundly
and thoroughly *political.*
In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over
the ownership and nature of cyberspace became loudly
and irretrievably public. People from some of the oddest
corners of American society suddenly found themselves
public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They
backpedalled, and tried to retreat back to the mandarin
obscurity of their cozy subcultural niches. This was
generally to prove a mistake.
But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990.
They
found themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-
pounding, persuading, touring, negotiating, posing for
publicity photos, submitting to interviews, squinting in the
limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly
sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.
It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should
have this competitive advantage.
The hackers of the digital underground are an
hermetic elite. They find it hard to make any remotely
convincing case for their actions in front of the general
public. Actually, hackers roundly despise the "ignorant"
public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the
system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among
themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of
class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism.
Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and
preserve their underground reputations. But if they speak
out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile
surface-tension of the underground, and they will be
harrassed or arrested. Over the longer term, most
hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give
up. As a political force, the digital underground is
hamstrung.
The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under
protracted seige. They have plenty of money with which to
push their calculated public image, but they waste much
energy and goodwill attacking one another with
slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos
have suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers,
they don't trust the public's judgement. And this distrust
may be well-founded. Should the general public of the
high-tech 1990s come to understand its own best interests
in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave
threat to the specialized technical power and authority
that the telcos have relished for over a century. The
telcos do have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized
expertise, influence in the halls of power, tactical allies
in law enforcement, and unbelievably vast amounts of
money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine
grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many
friends.
Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.
But cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their
knowledge that they feel will meet their institutional
purposes and further public order. Cops have respect,
they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets
and even power in the home, but cops don't do
particularly well in limelight. When pressed, they will
step out in the public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to
cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the
naive and misguided. But then they go back within their
time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom
and the rule-book.
The electronic civil libertarians, however, have
proven to be born political animals. They seemed to
grasp very early on the postmodern truism that
communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public
agenda -- and *keep it there* -- is power. Fame is power.
Simple personal fluency and eloquence can be power, if
you can somehow catch the public's eye and ear.
The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical
power" -- though they all owned computers, most were not
particularly advanced computer experts. They had a good
deal of money, but nowhere near the earthshaking wealth
and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or federal
agencies. They had no ability to arrest people. They
carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.
But they really knew how to network.
Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil
libertarians have operated very much in the open, more or
less right in the public hurly-burly. They have lectured
audiences galore and talked to countless journalists, and
have learned to refine their spiels. They've kept the
cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped
that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked
envelopes and spent small fortunes on airfare and long-
distance. In an information society, this open, overt,
obvious activity has proven to be a profound advantage.
In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace
assembled out of nowhere in particular, at warp speed.
This "group" (actually, a networking gaggle of interested
parties which scarcely deserves even that loose term) has
almost nothing in the way of formal organization. Those
formal civil libertarian organizations which did take an
interest in cyberspace issues, mainly the Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility and the American
Civil Liberties Union, were carried along by events in 1990,
and acted mostly as adjuncts, underwriters or launching-
pads.
The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the
greatest success of any of the groups in the Crackdown of
1990. At this writing, their future looks rosy and the
political initiative is firmly in their hands. This should
be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives and
lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.
#
In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino,
California, had a problem. Someone had illicitly copied a
small piece of Apple's proprietary software, software which
controlled an internal chip driving the Macintosh screen
display. This Color QuickDraw source code was a closely
guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property. Only
trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.
But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things
otherwise. This person (or persons) made several illicit
copies of this source code, perhaps as many as two dozen.
He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks
into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:
people in the computer industry who were associated with,
but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.
The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly
ideological, and very hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it
will be recalled, stole the fire of the Gods and gave this
potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden mankind.
A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the
corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu"
Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod.
The illicitly copied data was given away for free.
The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the
fate of the ancient Greek Prometheus, who was chained to
a rock for centuries by the vengeful gods while an eagle
tore and ate his liver. On the other hand, NuPrometheus
chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role
model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had
filched and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's
industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else). Instead
of giving fire to mankind, it was more as if NuPrometheus
had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic lighter.
The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. It
was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the
face for the Apple corporate heirarchy.
Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the
industry. Apple's founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both
taken their leave long since. Their raucous core of senior
employees had been a barnstorming crew of 1960s
Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with
the new button-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple.
Many of the programmers and developers who had
invented the Macintosh model in the early 1980s had also
taken their leave of the company. It was they, not the
current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had
invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The
NuPrometheus stunt was well-calculated to wound
company morale.
Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in
high-profile intellectual-property theft cases, industrial
espionage and theft of trade secrets. These were likely
the right people to call, and rumor has it that the entities
responsible were in fact discovered by the FBI, and then
quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus
was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or
jailed. But there were no further illicit releases of
Macintosh internal software. Eventually the painful issue
of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.
In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled
bystanders found themselves entertaining surprise guests
from the FBI.
One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow
is a most unusual man, difficult to describe in
conventional terms. He is perhaps best known as a
songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics
for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues,"
"I Need a Miracle," and many more; he has been writing
for the band since 1970.
Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock
lyricist should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer-
crime case, it might be well to say a word or two about the
Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most
successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural
emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San
Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and
lysergic transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a
veritable whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans,
tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and
open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the
realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful
Dead like knotted macrame.
The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead
devotees are radical Bohemians. This much is widely
understood. Exactly what this implies in the 1990s is
rather more problematic.
The Grateful Dead are among the world's most
popular and wealthy entertainers: number 20, according
to *Forbes* magazine, right between M.C. Hammer and
Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of purported
raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. They
have been earning sums much along this line for quite
some time now.
And while the Dead are not investment bankers or
three-piece-suit tax specialists -- they are, in point of
fact,
hippie musicians -- this money has not been squandered
in senseless Bohemian excess. The Dead have been
quietly active for many years, funding various worthy
activities in their extensive and widespread cultural
community.
The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in
the American power establishment. They nevertheless
are something of a force to be reckoned with. They have a
lot of money and a lot of friends in many places, both
likely and unlikely.
The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth
environmentalist rhetoric, but this hardly makes them
anti-technological Luddites. On the contrary, like most
rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their entire
adult lives in the company of complex electronic
equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated
tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy. And
their fancy is quite extensive.
The Deadhead community boasts any number of
recording engineers, lighting experts, rock video mavens,
electronic technicians of all descriptions. And the drift
goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, used
to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.
These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a
surprising number of people all over America, the
supposed dividing line between Bohemian and technician
simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set
of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its
neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte
Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy
fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary
himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-
graphics demos in his lecture tours.
John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful
Dead. He is, however, a ranking Deadhead.
Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A
vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the
mark, either. But Barlow might be better described as a
"poet" -- if one keeps in mind Percy Shelley's archaic
definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the
world."
Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator
status. In 1987, he narrowly missed the Republican
nomination for a seat in the Wyoming State Senate.
Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of
a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early
forties, married and the father of three daughters.
Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow
notions of consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican
rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch and became a
computer telecommunications devotee.
The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with
ease. He genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of
his modem, he leapt from small-town Pinedale, Wyoming,
into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd of
bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over
the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing
attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its
open-
endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer
journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study,
and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to
San Francisco to network with Deadhead friends. There
Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the
Californian computer community, including friendships
among the wilder spirits at Apple.
In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local
Wyoming agent of the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had
reached Wyoming.
Barlow was troubled to find himself under
investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of
federal attention. He had to struggle to explain the very
nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local FBI
man who specialized in cattle-rustling. Barlow, chatting
helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to
the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers"
generally under FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the
electronic community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker
called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a
suspect group called the Hackers Conference.
The Hackers Conference, which had been started in
1984, was a yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers
and enthusiasts. The hackers of the Hackers Conference
had little if anything to do with the hackers of the digital
underground. On the contrary, the hackers of this
conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech
CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This
group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers" most
likely to react with militant fury at any criminal
degradation of the term "hacker.")
Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a
crime, and though his computer had certainly not gone
out the door, was very troubled by this anomaly. He
carried the word to the Well.
Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an
emanation of the Point Foundation. Point Foundation,
the inspiration of a wealthy Californian 60s radical named
Stewart Brand, was to be a major launch-pad of the civil
libertarian effort.
Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of
their
fellow Bay Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were
multifaceted and multitudinous. Rigid ideological
consistency had never been a strong suit of the *Whole
Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed a
strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it
offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on
communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting
back-to-the-land. The *Whole Earth Catalog,* and its
sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a
National Book Award.
With the slow collapse of American radical dissent,
the *Whole Earth Catalog* had slipped to a more modest
corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine
incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point
Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of
"access to tools and ideas."
*CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was
never a widely popular magazine. Despite periodic
outbreaks of millenarian fervor, *CoEvolution Quarterly*
failed to revolutionize Western civilization and replace
leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian
paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point
Foundation cakewalked a fine line between impressive
brilliance and New Age flakiness. *CoEvolution
Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came out
on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white
graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by
subscription and word of mouth.
It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers.
And yet -- it never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in,
year out, decade in, decade out, some strange
demographic minority accreted to support the magazine.
The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in
the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes
hard to understand what held them together (if the often
bitter debate in the letter-columns could be described as
"togetherness").
But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient;
it
got by. Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh
computer, *CoEvolution Quarterly* suddenly hit the
rapids. Point Foundation had discovered the computer
revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog*
of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-
dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent
"cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point
Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and
began to take an extensive interest in the strange new
possibilities of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution
Quarterly* folded its teepee, replaced by *Whole Earth
Software Review* and eventually by *Whole Earth
Review* (the magazine's present incarnation, currently
under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard
Rheingold).
1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link." The Well was Point Foundation's
bulletin board system.
As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the
beginning, and remained one. It was local to San
Francisco. It was huge, with multiple phonelines and
enormous files of commentary. Its complex UNIX-based
software might be most charitably described as "user-
opaque." It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling
offices of a non-profit cultural foundation in Sausalito.
And it was crammed with fans of the Grateful Dead.
Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters
of the Bay Area counterculture, it was by no means a
"digital underground" board. Teenagers were fairly
scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings") were
thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended
to work in the information industry: hardware, software,
telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians,
academics, and journalists were especially common on
the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's open-handed
distribution of "tools and ideas."
There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a
dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft. No
one used handles. Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a
comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were sometimes
sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had
disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his
credit card numbers.
The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It
charged a modest sum for access and storage, and lost
money for years -- but not enough to hamper the Point
Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the
Well had about five thousand users. These users
wandered about a gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of
"Conferences", each conference itself consisting of a
welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens,
sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling,
multiperson debate that could last for months or years on
end.
In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like
this:
CONFERENCES ON THE WELL
WELL "Screenzine" Digest (g zine)
Best of the WELL - vintage material -
(g best)
Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g
newtops)
Business - Education
----------------------
Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds
(g cla)
Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons) Design
(g design)
Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g
disability)
Education (g ed) Energy
(g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g
home)
Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g
invest)
Kids91 (g kids) Legal
(g legal)
One Person Business (g one)
Periodical/newsletter(g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future
(g fut)
Translators (g trans) Travel
(g tra)
Work (g work)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)