amazing, in his last year of law school Godwin had
specialized in federal prosecutions and criminal
procedure. Acting entirely on his own, Godwin made up a
press packet which summarized the issues and provided
useful contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes
effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a
local board debate) broke the story again in the *Austin
American-Statesman* and then in *Newsweek.*
Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that.
As he joined the growing civil liberties debate on the
Internet, it was obvious to all parties involved that here
was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and
confusion, *genuinely understood everything he was
talking about.* The disparate elements of Godwin's
dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly as
the facets of a Rubik's cube.
When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff
attorney, Godwin was the obvious choice. He took the
Texas bar exam, left Austin, moved to Cambridge,
became a full-time, professional, computer civil
libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of
EFF, delivering well-received addresses on the issues to
crowds as disparate as academics, industrialists, science
fiction fans, and federal cops.
Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
#
Another early and influential participant in the
controversy was Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was
unique among investigators of the computer underground
in that she did not enter the debate with any set of
politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer
and computer security expert whose primary interest in
hackers was *scholarly.* She had a B.A. and M.A. in
mathematics, and a Ph.D. in computer science from
Purdue. She had worked for SRI International, the
California think-tank that was also the home of computer-
security maven Donn Parker, and had authored an
influential text called *Cryptography and Data Security.*
In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for Digital Equipment
Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center. Her
husband, Peter Denning, was also a computer security
expert, working for NASA's Research Institute for
Advanced Computer Science. He had edited the well-
received *Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms
and Viruses.*
Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the
digital underground, more or less with an anthropological
interest. There she discovered that these computer-
intruding hackers, who had been characterized as
unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society,
did in fact have their own subculture and their own rules.
They were not particularly well-considered rules, but they
were, in fact, rules. Basically, they didn't take money
and
they didn't break anything.
Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a
great deal to influence serious-minded computer
professionals -- the sort of people who merely rolled their
eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow.
For young hackers of the digital underground,
meeting Dorothy Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling
experience. Here was this neatly coiffed, conservatively
dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded most
hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an
IBM systems programmer with profound expertise in
computer architectures and high-security information
flow, who had personal friends in the FBI and the National
Security Agency.
Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the
American mathematical intelligentsia, a genuinely
brilliant person from the central ranks of the computer-
science elite. And here she was, gently questioning
twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the
deeper ethical implications of their behavior.
Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers
sat up very straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-
file stuff down to a faint whiff of brimstone.
Nevertheless,
the hackers *were* in fact prepared to seriously discuss
serious issues with Dorothy Denning. They were willing to
speak the unspeakable and defend the indefensible, to
blurt out their convictions that information cannot be
owned, that the databases of governments and large
corporations were a threat to the rights and privacy of
individuals.
Denning's articles made it clear to many that
"hacking" was not simple vandalism by some evil clique of
psychotics. "Hacking" was not an aberrant menace that
could be charmed away by ignoring it, or swept out of
existence by jailing a few ringleaders. Instead, "hacking"
was symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over
knowledge and power in the age of information.
Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers
were at least partially shared by forward-looking
management theorists in the business community: people
like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter Drucker, in his
book *The New Realities,* had stated that "control of
information by the government is no longer possible.
Indeed, information is now transnational. Like money, it
has no 'fatherland.'"
And management maven Tom Peters had chided
large corporations for uptight, proprietary attitudes in his
bestseller, *Thriving on Chaos:* "Information hoarding,
especially by politically motivated, power-seeking staffs,
had been commonplace throughout American industry,
service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible
millstone aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."
Dorothy Denning had shattered the social
membrane of the digital underground. She attended the
Neidorf trial, where she was prepared to testify for the
defense as an expert witness. She was a behind-the-
scenes organizer of two of the most important national
meetings of the computer civil libertarians. Though not a
zealot of any description, she brought disparate elements
of the electronic community into a surprising and fruitful
collusion.
Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the
Computer Science Department at Georgetown University
in Washington, DC.
#
There were many stellar figures in the civil
libertarian
community. There's no question, however, that its single
most influential figure was Mitchell D. Kapor. Other
people might have formal titles, or governmental
positions, have more experience with crime, or with the
law, or with the arcanities of computer security or
constitutional theory. But by 1991 Kapor had transcended
any such narrow role. Kapor had become "Mitch."
Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-
hocrat. Mitch had stood up first, he had spoken out
loudly, directly, vigorously and angrily, he had put his own
reputation, and his very considerable personal fortune, on
the line. By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known advocate
of his cause and was known *personally* by almost every
single human being in America with any direct influence
on the question of civil liberties in cyberspace. Mitch
had
built bridges, crossed voids, changed paradigms, forged
metaphors, made phone-calls and swapped business
cards to such spectacular effect that it had become
impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker
question" without wondering what Mitch might think --
and say -- and tell his friends.
The EFF had simply *networked* the situation into
an entirely new status quo. And in fact this had been EFF's
deliberate strategy from the beginning. Both Barlow and
Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had deliberately chosen
to work almost entirely through the electronic spiderweb
of "valuable personal contacts."
After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every
reason to look back with satisfaction. EFF had established
its own Internet node, "eff.org," with a well-stocked
electronic archive of documents on electronic civil rights,
privacy issues, and academic freedom. EFF was also
publishing *EFFector,* a quarterly printed journal, as
well
as *EFFector Online,* an electronic newsletter with over
1,200 subscribers. And EFF was thriving on the Well.
EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and
a full-time staff. It had become a membership
organization and was attracting grass-roots support. It
had also attracted the support of some thirty civil-rights
lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense of
the Constitution in Cyberspace.
EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in
Massachusetts to change state and federal legislation on
computer networking. Kapor in particular had become a
veteran expert witness, and had joined the Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board of the National
Academy of Science and Engineering.
EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers,
Freedom and Privacy" and the CPSR Roundtable. It had
carried out a press offensive that, in the words of
*EFFector,* "has affected the climate of opinion about
computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into
'hacker hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."
It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.
And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the
name of Steve Jackson, Steve Jackson Games Inc., and
three users of the Illuminati bulletin board system. The
defendants were, and are, the United States Secret
Service, William Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and
Henry Kleupfel.
The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin
federal court as of this writing, is a civil action for
damages
to redress alleged violations of the First and Fourth
Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as
the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (42 USC 2000aa et seq.),
and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 USC
2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).
EFF had established that it had credibility. It had
also established that it had teeth.
In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to
speak personally with Mitch Kapor. It was my final
interview for this book.
#
The city of Boston has always been one of the major
intellectual centers of the American republic. It is a very
old city by American standards, a place of skyscrapers
overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyards, where
the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-exist
with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old
Ironsides," the USS *Constitution.*
The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and
bitterest armed clashes of the American Revolution, was
fought in Boston's environs. Today there is a
monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout
much of the city. The willingness of the republican
revolutionaries to take up arms and fire on their
oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two full
centuries
have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still a potent center of
American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76 is
still a
potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion.
Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag
is necessarily a patriot. When I visited the spire in
September 1991, it bore a huge, badly-erased, spray-can
grafitto around its bottom reading "BRITS OUT -- IRA
PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-cased
diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and
redcoats, fighting and dying over the green hill, the
riverside marshes, the rebel trenchworks. Plaques
indicated the movement of troops, the shiftings of
strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument is occupied at its
very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-game
simulation.
The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities,
prominent among the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where the term "computer hacker" was first
coined. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 might be
interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:
traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism,
such as Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the
bare-knuckle industrial pragmatism of Chicago and
Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York wrapped in internal
struggle).
The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation is on 155 Second Street in Cambridge, a
Bostonian suburb north of the River Charles. Second
Street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick and
elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "NO
PARKING DURING DECLARED SNOW
EMERGENCY." This is an old area of modest
manufacturing industries; the EFF is catecorner from the
Greene Rubber Company. EFF's building is two stories of
red brick; its large wooden windows feature gracefully
arched tops and stone sills.
The glass window beside the Second Street entrance
bears three sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped
against the glass. They read: ON Technology. EFF. KEI.
"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which
currently specializes in "groupware" for the Apple
Macintosh computer. "Groupware" is intended to
promote efficient social interaction among office-workers
linked by computers. ON Technology's most successful
software products to date are "Meeting Maker" and
"Instant Update."
"KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal
holding company, the commercial entity that formally
controls his extensive investments in other hardware and
software corporations.
"EFF" is a political action group -- of a special sort.
Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the
handrails of a modest flight of stairs. A wall of modish
glass brick separates this anteroom from the offices.
Beyond the brick, there's an alarm system mounted on
the wall, a sleek, complex little number that resembles a
cross between a thermostat and a CD player. Piled
against the wall are box after box of a recent special issue
of *Scientific American,* "How to Work, Play, and Thrive
in Cyberspace," with extensive coverage of electronic
networking techniques and political issues, including an
article by Kapor himself. These boxes are addressed to
Gerard Van der Leun, EFF's Director of Communications,
who will shortly mail those magazines to every member of
the EFF.
The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON
Technology, which Kapor currently rents, is a modestly
bustling place. It's very much the same physical size as
Steve Jackson's gaming company. It's certainly a far cry
from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway shipping barn,
on the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned by
Lotus Development Corporation.
Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell
Kapor founded in the late 70s. The software program
Kapor co-authored, "Lotus 1-2-3," is still that company's
most profitable product. "Lotus 1-2-3" also bears a
singular distinction in the digital underground: it's
probably the most pirated piece of application software in
world history.
Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a
hall. Kapor, whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his
early forties, married and the father of two. He has a
round face, high forehead, straight nose, a slightly tousled
mop of black hair peppered with gray. His large brown
eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful.
He disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts
and tropical prints, not so much garish as simply cheerful
and just that little bit anomalous.
There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about
Mitch Kapor. He may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-
leather, guitar-strumming charisma of his Wyoming
colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's something about
the guy that still stops one short. He has the air of the
Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy,
Longfellow-quoting poker shark who only *happens* to
know the exact mathematical odds against drawing to an
inside straight. Even among his computer-community
colleagues, who are hardly known for mental sluggishness,
Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very intelligent man. He
speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures, his Boston accent
sometimes slipping to the sharp nasal tang of his youth in
Long Island.
Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much
of his philanthropic work, is a strong supporter of Boston's
Computer Museum. Kapor's interest in the history of his
industry has brought him some remarkable curios, such
as the "byte" just outside his office door. This "byte" --
eight digital bits -- has been salvaged from the wreck of an
electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. It's a
standing gunmetal rack about the size of a small toaster-
oven: with eight slots of hand-soldered breadboarding
featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes. If it fell off a table
it
could easily break your foot, but it was state-of-the-art
computation in the 1940s. (It would take exactly 157,184
of
these primordial toasters to hold the first part of this
book.)
There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that
some inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely
out of transistors, capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated
wiring.
Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do
a little mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal
Macintosh IIfx. If its giant screen were an open window,
an agile person could climb through it without much
trouble at all. There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow, a
memento of his recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a
black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend
CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR. It's Kapor, Barlow, and two
California venture-capitalist luminaries of their
acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer
dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags,
standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the
formerly Iron Curtain. They look as if they're having the
absolute time of their lives.
Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about
his youth -- high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays
attending Columbia University's high-school science
honors program, where he had his first experience
programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66. "I
was very interested," says Kapor, "and then I went off to
college and got distracted by drugs sex and rock and roll,
like anybody with half a brain would have then!" After
college he was a progressive-rock DJ in Hartford,
Connecticut, for a couple of years.
I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days --
if
he ever wished he could go back to radio work.
He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about
going back to be a DJ the day after Altamont."
Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job
programming mainframes in COBOL. He hated it. He
quit and became a teacher of transcendental meditation.
(It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that
gave the world "Lotus.")
In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the
Transcendental Meditation movement had rented a
gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz. It was an all-male
group -- a hundred and twenty of them -- determined
upon Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the
transcendant his best shot. He was becoming
disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization." "They
were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the
floor. His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "*They
don't levitate.*"
Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and
acquired a degree in counselling psychology. He worked a
while in a hospital, couldn't stand that either. "My rep
was," he says "a very bright kid with a lot of potential
who
hasn't found himself. Almost thirty. Sort of lost."
Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first
personal computer -- an Apple II. He sold his stereo to
raise cash and drove to New Hampshire to avoid the sales
tax.
"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was
hanging out in a computer store and I saw another guy, a
man in his forties, well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on
his conversation with the salesman. He didn't know
anything about computers. I'd had a year programming.
And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I
went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a
consultant." He pauses. "I don't know where I got the
nerve to do this. It was uncharacteristic. I just said, 'I
think
I can help you, I've been listening, this is what you need
to
do and I think I can do it for you.' And he took me on! He
was my first client! I became a computer consultant the
first day after I bought the Apple II."
Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted
more clients for his consultant service, and started an
Apple users' group.
A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate
student at MIT, had a problem. He was doing a thesis on
an arcane form of financial statistics, but could not wedge
himself into the crowded queue for time on MIT's
mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr.
Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT
mainframes, Kapor himself might have never invented
Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have been set back
for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however,
and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem
down. Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC
that did the job.
It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue,
that it might be possible to *sell* this program. They
marketed it themselves, in plastic baggies, for about a
hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "This was a total
cottage industry by a marginal consultant," Kapor says
proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to God."
Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure
on Wall Street, urged Kapor to go to MIT's business
school for an MBA. Kapor did seven months there, but
never got his MBA. He picked up some useful tools --
mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting -- and,
in his own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he
dropped out and went to Silicon Valley.
The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's
premier business program, had shown an interest in
Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked diligently for them for six
months, got tired of California, and went back to Boston
where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group
had made the critical error of bringing in "professional
management." "That drove them into the ground," Kapor
says.
"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days,"
I muse.
Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus.... we *bought*
it."
"Oh. You *bought* it?"
"Yeah."
"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"
Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"
Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny
of himself or his industry. The hottest software
commodities of the early 1980s were *computer games* --
the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home in
America. Kapor got into business software simply
because he didn't have any particular feeling for
computer games. But he was supremely fast on his feet,
open to new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts. And
his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal with
-- gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of
Lotus 1-2-3). Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall
Street analyst and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor
was the founder and CEO of Lotus, one of the most
spectacularly successful business ventures of the later
twentieth century.
He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he
actually knows how much money he has.
"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."
How much does he actually have, then?
He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I
talk about. Issues of money and class are things that cut
pretty close to the bone."
I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might
presume, impolitely, that Kapor has at least forty million -
-
that's what he got the year he left Lotus. People who ought
to know claim Kapor has about a hundred and fifty
million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings.
If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and
rival Bill Gates has stuck with his own software start-up,
Microsoft, then Kapor would likely have much the same
fortune Gates has -- somewhere in the neighborhood of
three billion, give or take a few hundred million. Mitch
Kapor has all the money he wants. Money has lost
whatever charm it ever held for him -- probably not much
in the first place. When Lotus became too uptight, too
bureaucratic, too far from the true sources of his own
satisfaction, Kapor walked. He simply severed all
connections with the company and went out the door. It
stunned everyone -- except those who knew him best.
Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a
thorough transformation in cyberspace politics. In its
first
year, EFF's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars.
Kapor is running EFF out of his pocket change.
Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not
consider himself a civil libertarian per se. He has spent
quite some time with true-blue civil libertarians lately,
and
there's a political-correctness to them that bugs him. They
seem to him to spend entirely too much time in legal
nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil
rights in the everyday real world.
Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he
prefers his involvements direct, personal, and hands-on.
"The fact that EFF has a node on the Internet is a great
thing. We're a publisher. We're a distributor of
information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node
carries is back issues of *Phrack.* They had an internal
debate about that in EFF, and finally decided to take the
plunge. They might carry other digital underground
publications -- but if they do, he says, "we'll certainly
carry
Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants to put
up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole
spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people making
up their own minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the
editorials."
Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of
the Internet in the service of the public interest. "The
problem with being a node on the Net today is that you've
got to have a captive technical specialist. We have Chris
Davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky beast!
We couldn't do it ourselves!"
He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has
to evolve is much more standardized units, that a non-
technical person can feel comfortable with. It's the same
shift as from minicomputers to PCs. I can see a future in
which any person can have a Node on the Net. Any
person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we
now have. It's possible. We're working actively."
Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in
command in his material. "You go tell a hardware
Internet hacker that everyone should have a node on the
Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is,
'IP
doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the
Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply
not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of
usable addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor
says, "is: evolve the protocol! Get the smart people
together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID? Do we
add new protocol? Don't just say, *we can't do it.*"
Getting smart people together to figure out what to
do is a skill at which Kapor clearly excels. I counter
that
people on the Internet rather enjoy their elite technical
status, and don't seem particularly anxious to democratize
the Net.
Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that
this is the snobbery of the people on the *Mayflower*
looking down their noses at the people who came over *on
the second boat!* Just because they got here a year, or
five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn't
give them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"
I remark that the telcos are an electronic network,
too, and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge
pretty closely.
Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are
entirely different animals. "The Internet is an open
system, everything is published, everything gets argued
about, basically by anybody who can get in. Mostly, it's
exclusive and elitist just because it's so difficult. Let's
make it easier to use."
On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of
emphasis, the so-called elitists do have a point as well.
"Before people start coming in, who are new, who want to
make suggestions, and criticize the Net as 'all screwed
up'.... They should at least take the time to understand
the
culture on its own terms. It has its own history -- show
some respect for it. I'm a conservative, to that extent."
The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of
telecommunications. The Internet is decentralized, non-
heirarchical, almost anarchic. There are no bosses, no
chain of command, no secret data. If each node obeys the
general interface standards, there's simply no need for
any central network authority.
Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an
institution? I ask.
That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment.
"Their big advantage, that they have now, is that they have
all of the wiring. But two things are happening. Anyone
with right-of-way is putting down fiber -- Southern Pacific
Railroad, people like that -- there's enormous 'dark fiber'
laid in." ("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose
enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current
usage that much of the fiber still has no light-signals on
it -
- it's still 'dark,' awaiting future use.)
"The other thing that's happening is the local-loop
stuff is going to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to
the
cable TV companies to AT&T wants to put in these things
called 'personal communication systems.' So you could
have local competition -- you could have multiplicity of
people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up on
poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber.
So what happens to the telephone companies? There's
enormous pressure on them from both sides.
"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a
post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated
monopolies is bad. People will look back on it and say that
in the 19th and 20th centuries the idea of public utilities
was an okay compromise. You needed one set of wires in
the ground. It was too economically inefficient, otherwise.
And that meant one entity running it. But now, with pieces
being wireless -- the connections are going to be via high-
level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, *ultimately*
there
are going to be wires -- but the wires are just a commodity.
Fiber, wireless. You no longer *need* a utility."
Water utilities? Gas utilities?
Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when
what you're moving is information, instead of physical
substances, then you can play by a different set of rules.
We're evolving those rules now! Hopefully you can have
a much more decentralized system, and one in which
there's more competition in the marketplace.
"The role of government will be to make sure that
nobody cheats. The proverbial 'level playing field.' A
policy that prevents monopolization. It should result in
better service, lower prices, more choices, and local
empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on local
empowerment."
Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision
which he and his allies are working out in considerable
detail and with great energy. Dark, cynical, morbid
cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid considering some of
the darker implications of "decentralized, nonhierarchical,
locally empowered" networking.
I remark that some pundits have suggested that
electronic networking -- faxes, phones, small-scale
photocopiers -- played a strong role in dissolving the
power of centralized communism and causing the
collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh
back from the Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all
by themselves, is rather wishful thinking.
Has it occurred to him that electronic networking
might corrode America's industrial and political
infrastructure to the point where the whole thing becomes
untenable, unworkable -- and the old order just collapses
headlong, like in Eastern Europe?
"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's
extraordinarily
unlikely. In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had
similar hopes about personal computers -- which utterly
failed to materialize." He grins wryly, then his eyes
narrow.
"I'm *very* opposed to techno-utopias. Every time I see
one, I either run away, or try to kill it."
It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to
make the world safe for democracy. He certainly is not
trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians -- least
of
all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists.
What he really hopes to do is make the world safe for
future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized, small-
scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and
brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring
attic
capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.
Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare
combination of visionary intensity with a strong practical
streak. The Board of the EFF: John Barlow, Jerry Berman
of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve
Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West
computer entrepreneurism -- share his gift, his vision, and
his formidable networking talents. They are people of the
1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence and rewarded with
wealth and influence. They are some of the best and the
brightest that the electronic community has to offer. But
can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only
dreaming? They are so few. And there is so much against
them.
I leave Kapor and his networking employees
struggling cheerfully with the promising intricacies of
their
newly installed Macintosh System 7 software. The next
day is Saturday. EFF is closed. I pay a few visits to
points
of interest downtown.
One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.
It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-
and-white speckled granite. It sits in the plaza of the
John
F. Kennedy Federal Building, the very place where Kapor
was once fingerprinted by the FBI.
The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original
telephone. "BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it
reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875, Alexander Graham Bell and
Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires.
"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth
floor garret at what was then 109 Court Street and marked
the beginning of world-wide telephone service."
109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's
plaque, across a street, is one of the central offices of
NYNEX, the local Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.
I cross the street and circle the telco building,
slowly,
hands in my jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New
England autumn day. The central office is a handsome
1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco, eight stories high.
Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck.
The generator strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they
already have their own generators in this eight-story
monster? Then the suspicion strikes me that NYNEX
must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage
which crashed New York City. Belt-and-suspenders, this
generator. Very telco.
Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a
handsome bronze bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers,
and birds, entwining the Bell logo and the legend NEW
ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY
-- an entity which no longer officially exists.
The doors are locked securely. I peer through the
shadowed glass. Inside is an official poster reading:
"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company
ATTENTION
"All persons while on New England Telephone
Company premises are required to visibly wear their
identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2, Page 1).
"Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are
required to visibly wear a daily pass.
"Thank you.
Kevin C. Stanton.
Building Security Coordinator."
Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed
metal security door, a locked delivery entrance. Some
passing stranger has grafitti-tagged this door, with a
single
word in red spray-painted cursive:
*Fury*
#
My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over
now. I have deliberately saved the best for last.
In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy
Roundtable, in Washington, DC. CPSR, Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, was a sister
organization of EFF, or perhaps its aunt, being older and
perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of
politics.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
began in 1981 in Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group
of Californian computer scientists and technicians, united
by nothing more than an electronic mailing list. This
typical high-tech ad-hocracy received the dignity of its
own acronym in 1982, and was formally incorporated in
1983.
CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an
educational outreach effort, sternly warning against any
foolish and unthinking trust in complex computer
systems. CPSR insisted that mere computers should
never be considered a magic panacea for humanity's
social, ethical or political problems. CPSR members were
especially troubled about the stability, safety, and
dependability of military computer systems, and very
especially troubled by those systems controlling nuclear
arsenals. CPSR was best-known for its persistent and well-
publicized attacks on the scientific credibility of the
Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").
In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political
activist group, with over two thousand members in twenty-
one local chapters across the US. It was especially active
in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC, where its
Washington office sponsored the Public Policy
Roundtable.
The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF,
which had passed CPSR an extensive grant for operations.
This was the first large-scale, official meeting of what was
to become the electronic civil libertarian community.
Sixty people attended, myself included -- in this
instance, not so much as a journalist as a cyberpunk
author. Many of the luminaries of the field took part:
Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course. Richard Civille
and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the ACLU.
John Quarterman, author of *The Matrix.* Steven Levy,
author of *Hackers.* George Perry and Sandy Weiss of
Prodigy Services, there to network about the civil-liberties
troubles their young commercial network was
experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo,
manager of the Well. Steve Jackson was there, having
finally found his ideal target audience, and so was Craig
Neidorf, "Knight Lightning" himself, with his attorney,
Sheldon Zenner. Katie Hafner, science journalist, and co-
author of *Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the
Computer Frontier.* Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and
fabled Internet guru. Janlori Goldman of the ACLU's
Project on Privacy and Technology. John Nagle of
Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the House
Judiciary Committee. Tom Guidoboni, the defense
attorney in the Internet Worm case. Lance Hoffman,
computer-science professor at The George Washington
University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host of others
no less distinguished.
Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address,
expressing his determination to keep ahead of the curve
on the issue of electronic free speech. The address was
well-received, and the sense of excitement was palpable.
Every panel discussion was interesting -- some were
entirely compelling. People networked with an almost
frantic interest.
I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch
discussion with Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler
being a former director of the National Security Agency.
As this was the first known encounter between an actual
no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of America's
largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat,
there was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.
Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In
fact all the discussions at the CPSR were officially off-
the-
record, the idea being to do some serious networking in an
atmosphere of complete frankness, rather than to stage a
media circus.
In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting
and intensely valuable, was as nothing compared to the
truly mind-boggling event that transpired a mere month
later.
#
"Computers, Freedom and Privacy." Four hundred
people from every conceivable corner of America's
electronic community. As a science fiction writer, I have
been to some weird gigs in my day, but this thing is truly
*beyond the pale.* Even "Cyberthon," Point Foundation's
"Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area psychedelia
collided headlong with the emergent world of
computerized virtual reality, was like a Kiwanis Club gig
compared to this astonishing do.
The "electronic community" had reached an apogee.
Almost every principal in this book is in attendance. Civil
Libertarians. Computer Cops. The Digital Underground.
Even a few discreet telco people. Colorcoded dots for
lapel tags are distributed. Free Expression issues. Law
Enforcement. Computer Security. Privacy. Journalists.
Lawyers. Educators. Librarians. Programmers. Stylish
punk-black dots for the hackers and phone phreaks.
Almost everyone here seems to wear eight or nine dots, to
have six or seven professional hats.
It is a community. Something like Lebanon perhaps,
but a digital nation. People who had feuded all year in the
national press, people who entertained the deepest
suspicions of one another's motives and ethics, are now in
each others' laps. "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except
for small irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the
convention's token lunatic, a surprising bonhomie
reigned. CFP was like a wedding-party in which two lovers,
unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot in a
clearly disastrous matrimony.
It is clear to both families -- even to neighbors and
random guests -- that this is not a workable relationship,
and yet the young couple's desperate attraction can brook
no further delay. They simply cannot help themselves.
Crockery will fly, shrieks from their newlywed home will
wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a
vulture over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and
there is going to be a child from it. Tragedies end in
death;
comedies in marriage. The Hacker Crackdown is ending
in marriage. And there will be a child.
From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry
Barlow, cyberspace ranger, is here. His color photo in
*The New York Times Magazine,* Barlow scowling in a
grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark hat,
a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost and an
awesome frontier rifle tucked under one arm, will be the
single most striking visual image of the Hacker
Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest of honor -- along with
Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do they
expect these dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?
Barlow delivers the first address.
Uncharacteristically, he is hoarse -- the sheer volume of
roadwork has worn him down. He speaks briefly,
congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his leave
to a storm of applause.
Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly
nervous. She's been on the Well a lot lately. Reading
those Barlow posts. Following Barlow is a challenge to
anyone. In honor of the famous lyricist for the Grateful
Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read -- *a
poem.* A poem she has composed herself.
It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of
Robert W. Service's *The Cremation of Sam McGee,* but
it is in fact, a poem. It's the *Ballad of the Electronic
Frontier!* A poem about the Hacker Crackdown and the
sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes. The
score
or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a
nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is
the funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. The
hackers and civil-libs, who had this woman figured for Ilsa
She-Wolf of the SS, are staring with their jaws hanging
loosely. Never in the wildest reaches of their imagination
had they figured Gail Thackeray was capable of such a
totally off-the-wall move. You can see them punching
their mental CONTROL-RESET buttons. Jesus! This
woman's a hacker weirdo! She's *just like us!* God,
this
changes everything!
Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been
the only cop at the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with
his arm bent by Dorothy Denning. He was guarded and
tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable; a "lion thrown to the
Christians."
At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly
waxes eloquent and even droll, describing the FBI's
"NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital catalog of criminal records,
as if he has suddenly become some weird hybrid of
George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes
an arcane joke about statistical analysis. At least a third
of
the crowd laughs aloud.
"They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse
observes. He had been addressing cops -- *straight* cops,
not computer people. It had been a worthy meeting,
specialized in federal prosecutions and criminal
procedure. Acting entirely on his own, Godwin made up a
press packet which summarized the issues and provided
useful contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes
effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a
local board debate) broke the story again in the *Austin
American-Statesman* and then in *Newsweek.*
Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that.
As he joined the growing civil liberties debate on the
Internet, it was obvious to all parties involved that here
was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and
confusion, *genuinely understood everything he was
talking about.* The disparate elements of Godwin's
dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly as
the facets of a Rubik's cube.
When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff
attorney, Godwin was the obvious choice. He took the
Texas bar exam, left Austin, moved to Cambridge,
became a full-time, professional, computer civil
libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of
EFF, delivering well-received addresses on the issues to
crowds as disparate as academics, industrialists, science
fiction fans, and federal cops.
Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
#
Another early and influential participant in the
controversy was Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was
unique among investigators of the computer underground
in that she did not enter the debate with any set of
politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer
and computer security expert whose primary interest in
hackers was *scholarly.* She had a B.A. and M.A. in
mathematics, and a Ph.D. in computer science from
Purdue. She had worked for SRI International, the
California think-tank that was also the home of computer-
security maven Donn Parker, and had authored an
influential text called *Cryptography and Data Security.*
In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for Digital Equipment
Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center. Her
husband, Peter Denning, was also a computer security
expert, working for NASA's Research Institute for
Advanced Computer Science. He had edited the well-
received *Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms
and Viruses.*
Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the
digital underground, more or less with an anthropological
interest. There she discovered that these computer-
intruding hackers, who had been characterized as
unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society,
did in fact have their own subculture and their own rules.
They were not particularly well-considered rules, but they
were, in fact, rules. Basically, they didn't take money
and
they didn't break anything.
Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a
great deal to influence serious-minded computer
professionals -- the sort of people who merely rolled their
eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow.
For young hackers of the digital underground,
meeting Dorothy Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling
experience. Here was this neatly coiffed, conservatively
dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded most
hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an
IBM systems programmer with profound expertise in
computer architectures and high-security information
flow, who had personal friends in the FBI and the National
Security Agency.
Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the
American mathematical intelligentsia, a genuinely
brilliant person from the central ranks of the computer-
science elite. And here she was, gently questioning
twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the
deeper ethical implications of their behavior.
Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers
sat up very straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-
file stuff down to a faint whiff of brimstone.
Nevertheless,
the hackers *were* in fact prepared to seriously discuss
serious issues with Dorothy Denning. They were willing to
speak the unspeakable and defend the indefensible, to
blurt out their convictions that information cannot be
owned, that the databases of governments and large
corporations were a threat to the rights and privacy of
individuals.
Denning's articles made it clear to many that
"hacking" was not simple vandalism by some evil clique of
psychotics. "Hacking" was not an aberrant menace that
could be charmed away by ignoring it, or swept out of
existence by jailing a few ringleaders. Instead, "hacking"
was symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over
knowledge and power in the age of information.
Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers
were at least partially shared by forward-looking
management theorists in the business community: people
like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter Drucker, in his
book *The New Realities,* had stated that "control of
information by the government is no longer possible.
Indeed, information is now transnational. Like money, it
has no 'fatherland.'"
And management maven Tom Peters had chided
large corporations for uptight, proprietary attitudes in his
bestseller, *Thriving on Chaos:* "Information hoarding,
especially by politically motivated, power-seeking staffs,
had been commonplace throughout American industry,
service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible
millstone aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."
Dorothy Denning had shattered the social
membrane of the digital underground. She attended the
Neidorf trial, where she was prepared to testify for the
defense as an expert witness. She was a behind-the-
scenes organizer of two of the most important national
meetings of the computer civil libertarians. Though not a
zealot of any description, she brought disparate elements
of the electronic community into a surprising and fruitful
collusion.
Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the
Computer Science Department at Georgetown University
in Washington, DC.
#
There were many stellar figures in the civil
libertarian
community. There's no question, however, that its single
most influential figure was Mitchell D. Kapor. Other
people might have formal titles, or governmental
positions, have more experience with crime, or with the
law, or with the arcanities of computer security or
constitutional theory. But by 1991 Kapor had transcended
any such narrow role. Kapor had become "Mitch."
Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-
hocrat. Mitch had stood up first, he had spoken out
loudly, directly, vigorously and angrily, he had put his own
reputation, and his very considerable personal fortune, on
the line. By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known advocate
of his cause and was known *personally* by almost every
single human being in America with any direct influence
on the question of civil liberties in cyberspace. Mitch
had
built bridges, crossed voids, changed paradigms, forged
metaphors, made phone-calls and swapped business
cards to such spectacular effect that it had become
impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker
question" without wondering what Mitch might think --
and say -- and tell his friends.
The EFF had simply *networked* the situation into
an entirely new status quo. And in fact this had been EFF's
deliberate strategy from the beginning. Both Barlow and
Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had deliberately chosen
to work almost entirely through the electronic spiderweb
of "valuable personal contacts."
After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every
reason to look back with satisfaction. EFF had established
its own Internet node, "eff.org," with a well-stocked
electronic archive of documents on electronic civil rights,
privacy issues, and academic freedom. EFF was also
publishing *EFFector,* a quarterly printed journal, as
well
as *EFFector Online,* an electronic newsletter with over
1,200 subscribers. And EFF was thriving on the Well.
EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and
a full-time staff. It had become a membership
organization and was attracting grass-roots support. It
had also attracted the support of some thirty civil-rights
lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense of
the Constitution in Cyberspace.
EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in
Massachusetts to change state and federal legislation on
computer networking. Kapor in particular had become a
veteran expert witness, and had joined the Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board of the National
Academy of Science and Engineering.
EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers,
Freedom and Privacy" and the CPSR Roundtable. It had
carried out a press offensive that, in the words of
*EFFector,* "has affected the climate of opinion about
computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into
'hacker hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."
It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.
And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the
name of Steve Jackson, Steve Jackson Games Inc., and
three users of the Illuminati bulletin board system. The
defendants were, and are, the United States Secret
Service, William Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and
Henry Kleupfel.
The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin
federal court as of this writing, is a civil action for
damages
to redress alleged violations of the First and Fourth
Amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as
the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (42 USC 2000aa et seq.),
and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 USC
2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).
EFF had established that it had credibility. It had
also established that it had teeth.
In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to
speak personally with Mitch Kapor. It was my final
interview for this book.
#
The city of Boston has always been one of the major
intellectual centers of the American republic. It is a very
old city by American standards, a place of skyscrapers
overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyards, where
the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-exist
with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old
Ironsides," the USS *Constitution.*
The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and
bitterest armed clashes of the American Revolution, was
fought in Boston's environs. Today there is a
monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout
much of the city. The willingness of the republican
revolutionaries to take up arms and fire on their
oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two full
centuries
have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still a potent center of
American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76 is
still a
potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion.
Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag
is necessarily a patriot. When I visited the spire in
September 1991, it bore a huge, badly-erased, spray-can
grafitto around its bottom reading "BRITS OUT -- IRA
PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-cased
diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and
redcoats, fighting and dying over the green hill, the
riverside marshes, the rebel trenchworks. Plaques
indicated the movement of troops, the shiftings of
strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument is occupied at its
very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-game
simulation.
The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities,
prominent among the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, where the term "computer hacker" was first
coined. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 might be
interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:
traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism,
such as Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the
bare-knuckle industrial pragmatism of Chicago and
Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York wrapped in internal
struggle).
The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation is on 155 Second Street in Cambridge, a
Bostonian suburb north of the River Charles. Second
Street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick and
elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "NO
PARKING DURING DECLARED SNOW
EMERGENCY." This is an old area of modest
manufacturing industries; the EFF is catecorner from the
Greene Rubber Company. EFF's building is two stories of
red brick; its large wooden windows feature gracefully
arched tops and stone sills.
The glass window beside the Second Street entrance
bears three sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped
against the glass. They read: ON Technology. EFF. KEI.
"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which
currently specializes in "groupware" for the Apple
Macintosh computer. "Groupware" is intended to
promote efficient social interaction among office-workers
linked by computers. ON Technology's most successful
software products to date are "Meeting Maker" and
"Instant Update."
"KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal
holding company, the commercial entity that formally
controls his extensive investments in other hardware and
software corporations.
"EFF" is a political action group -- of a special sort.
Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the
handrails of a modest flight of stairs. A wall of modish
glass brick separates this anteroom from the offices.
Beyond the brick, there's an alarm system mounted on
the wall, a sleek, complex little number that resembles a
cross between a thermostat and a CD player. Piled
against the wall are box after box of a recent special issue
of *Scientific American,* "How to Work, Play, and Thrive
in Cyberspace," with extensive coverage of electronic
networking techniques and political issues, including an
article by Kapor himself. These boxes are addressed to
Gerard Van der Leun, EFF's Director of Communications,
who will shortly mail those magazines to every member of
the EFF.
The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON
Technology, which Kapor currently rents, is a modestly
bustling place. It's very much the same physical size as
Steve Jackson's gaming company. It's certainly a far cry
from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway shipping barn,
on the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned by
Lotus Development Corporation.
Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell
Kapor founded in the late 70s. The software program
Kapor co-authored, "Lotus 1-2-3," is still that company's
most profitable product. "Lotus 1-2-3" also bears a
singular distinction in the digital underground: it's
probably the most pirated piece of application software in
world history.
Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a
hall. Kapor, whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his
early forties, married and the father of two. He has a
round face, high forehead, straight nose, a slightly tousled
mop of black hair peppered with gray. His large brown
eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful.
He disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts
and tropical prints, not so much garish as simply cheerful
and just that little bit anomalous.
There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about
Mitch Kapor. He may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-
leather, guitar-strumming charisma of his Wyoming
colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's something about
the guy that still stops one short. He has the air of the
Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy,
Longfellow-quoting poker shark who only *happens* to
know the exact mathematical odds against drawing to an
inside straight. Even among his computer-community
colleagues, who are hardly known for mental sluggishness,
Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very intelligent man. He
speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures, his Boston accent
sometimes slipping to the sharp nasal tang of his youth in
Long Island.
Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much
of his philanthropic work, is a strong supporter of Boston's
Computer Museum. Kapor's interest in the history of his
industry has brought him some remarkable curios, such
as the "byte" just outside his office door. This "byte" --
eight digital bits -- has been salvaged from the wreck of an
electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. It's a
standing gunmetal rack about the size of a small toaster-
oven: with eight slots of hand-soldered breadboarding
featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes. If it fell off a table
it
could easily break your foot, but it was state-of-the-art
computation in the 1940s. (It would take exactly 157,184
of
these primordial toasters to hold the first part of this
book.)
There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that
some inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely
out of transistors, capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated
wiring.
Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do
a little mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal
Macintosh IIfx. If its giant screen were an open window,
an agile person could climb through it without much
trouble at all. There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow, a
memento of his recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a
black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend
CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR. It's Kapor, Barlow, and two
California venture-capitalist luminaries of their
acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer
dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags,
standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the
formerly Iron Curtain. They look as if they're having the
absolute time of their lives.
Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about
his youth -- high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays
attending Columbia University's high-school science
honors program, where he had his first experience
programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66. "I
was very interested," says Kapor, "and then I went off to
college and got distracted by drugs sex and rock and roll,
like anybody with half a brain would have then!" After
college he was a progressive-rock DJ in Hartford,
Connecticut, for a couple of years.
I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days --
if
he ever wished he could go back to radio work.
He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about
going back to be a DJ the day after Altamont."
Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job
programming mainframes in COBOL. He hated it. He
quit and became a teacher of transcendental meditation.
(It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that
gave the world "Lotus.")
In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the
Transcendental Meditation movement had rented a
gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz. It was an all-male
group -- a hundred and twenty of them -- determined
upon Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the
transcendant his best shot. He was becoming
disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization." "They
were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the
floor. His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "*They
don't levitate.*"
Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and
acquired a degree in counselling psychology. He worked a
while in a hospital, couldn't stand that either. "My rep
was," he says "a very bright kid with a lot of potential
who
hasn't found himself. Almost thirty. Sort of lost."
Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first
personal computer -- an Apple II. He sold his stereo to
raise cash and drove to New Hampshire to avoid the sales
tax.
"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was
hanging out in a computer store and I saw another guy, a
man in his forties, well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on
his conversation with the salesman. He didn't know
anything about computers. I'd had a year programming.
And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I
went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a
consultant." He pauses. "I don't know where I got the
nerve to do this. It was uncharacteristic. I just said, 'I
think
I can help you, I've been listening, this is what you need
to
do and I think I can do it for you.' And he took me on! He
was my first client! I became a computer consultant the
first day after I bought the Apple II."
Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted
more clients for his consultant service, and started an
Apple users' group.
A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate
student at MIT, had a problem. He was doing a thesis on
an arcane form of financial statistics, but could not wedge
himself into the crowded queue for time on MIT's
mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr.
Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT
mainframes, Kapor himself might have never invented
Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have been set back
for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however,
and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem
down. Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC
that did the job.
It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue,
that it might be possible to *sell* this program. They
marketed it themselves, in plastic baggies, for about a
hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "This was a total
cottage industry by a marginal consultant," Kapor says
proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to God."
Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure
on Wall Street, urged Kapor to go to MIT's business
school for an MBA. Kapor did seven months there, but
never got his MBA. He picked up some useful tools --
mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting -- and,
in his own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he
dropped out and went to Silicon Valley.
The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's
premier business program, had shown an interest in
Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked diligently for them for six
months, got tired of California, and went back to Boston
where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group
had made the critical error of bringing in "professional
management." "That drove them into the ground," Kapor
says.
"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days,"
I muse.
Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus.... we *bought*
it."
"Oh. You *bought* it?"
"Yeah."
"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"
Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"
Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny
of himself or his industry. The hottest software
commodities of the early 1980s were *computer games* --
the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home in
America. Kapor got into business software simply
because he didn't have any particular feeling for
computer games. But he was supremely fast on his feet,
open to new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts. And
his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal with
-- gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of
Lotus 1-2-3). Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall
Street analyst and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor
was the founder and CEO of Lotus, one of the most
spectacularly successful business ventures of the later
twentieth century.
He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he
actually knows how much money he has.
"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."
How much does he actually have, then?
He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I
talk about. Issues of money and class are things that cut
pretty close to the bone."
I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might
presume, impolitely, that Kapor has at least forty million -
-
that's what he got the year he left Lotus. People who ought
to know claim Kapor has about a hundred and fifty
million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings.
If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and
rival Bill Gates has stuck with his own software start-up,
Microsoft, then Kapor would likely have much the same
fortune Gates has -- somewhere in the neighborhood of
three billion, give or take a few hundred million. Mitch
Kapor has all the money he wants. Money has lost
whatever charm it ever held for him -- probably not much
in the first place. When Lotus became too uptight, too
bureaucratic, too far from the true sources of his own
satisfaction, Kapor walked. He simply severed all
connections with the company and went out the door. It
stunned everyone -- except those who knew him best.
Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a
thorough transformation in cyberspace politics. In its
first
year, EFF's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars.
Kapor is running EFF out of his pocket change.
Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not
consider himself a civil libertarian per se. He has spent
quite some time with true-blue civil libertarians lately,
and
there's a political-correctness to them that bugs him. They
seem to him to spend entirely too much time in legal
nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil
rights in the everyday real world.
Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he
prefers his involvements direct, personal, and hands-on.
"The fact that EFF has a node on the Internet is a great
thing. We're a publisher. We're a distributor of
information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node
carries is back issues of *Phrack.* They had an internal
debate about that in EFF, and finally decided to take the
plunge. They might carry other digital underground
publications -- but if they do, he says, "we'll certainly
carry
Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants to put
up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole
spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people making
up their own minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the
editorials."
Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of
the Internet in the service of the public interest. "The
problem with being a node on the Net today is that you've
got to have a captive technical specialist. We have Chris
Davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky beast!
We couldn't do it ourselves!"
He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has
to evolve is much more standardized units, that a non-
technical person can feel comfortable with. It's the same
shift as from minicomputers to PCs. I can see a future in
which any person can have a Node on the Net. Any
person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we
now have. It's possible. We're working actively."
Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in
command in his material. "You go tell a hardware
Internet hacker that everyone should have a node on the
Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is,
'IP
doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the
Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply
not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of
usable addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor
says, "is: evolve the protocol! Get the smart people
together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID? Do we
add new protocol? Don't just say, *we can't do it.*"
Getting smart people together to figure out what to
do is a skill at which Kapor clearly excels. I counter
that
people on the Internet rather enjoy their elite technical
status, and don't seem particularly anxious to democratize
the Net.
Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that
this is the snobbery of the people on the *Mayflower*
looking down their noses at the people who came over *on
the second boat!* Just because they got here a year, or
five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn't
give them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"
I remark that the telcos are an electronic network,
too, and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge
pretty closely.
Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are
entirely different animals. "The Internet is an open
system, everything is published, everything gets argued
about, basically by anybody who can get in. Mostly, it's
exclusive and elitist just because it's so difficult. Let's
make it easier to use."
On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of
emphasis, the so-called elitists do have a point as well.
"Before people start coming in, who are new, who want to
make suggestions, and criticize the Net as 'all screwed
up'.... They should at least take the time to understand
the
culture on its own terms. It has its own history -- show
some respect for it. I'm a conservative, to that extent."
The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of
telecommunications. The Internet is decentralized, non-
heirarchical, almost anarchic. There are no bosses, no
chain of command, no secret data. If each node obeys the
general interface standards, there's simply no need for
any central network authority.
Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an
institution? I ask.
That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment.
"Their big advantage, that they have now, is that they have
all of the wiring. But two things are happening. Anyone
with right-of-way is putting down fiber -- Southern Pacific
Railroad, people like that -- there's enormous 'dark fiber'
laid in." ("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose
enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current
usage that much of the fiber still has no light-signals on
it -
- it's still 'dark,' awaiting future use.)
"The other thing that's happening is the local-loop
stuff is going to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to
the
cable TV companies to AT&T wants to put in these things
called 'personal communication systems.' So you could
have local competition -- you could have multiplicity of
people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up on
poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber.
So what happens to the telephone companies? There's
enormous pressure on them from both sides.
"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a
post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated
monopolies is bad. People will look back on it and say that
in the 19th and 20th centuries the idea of public utilities
was an okay compromise. You needed one set of wires in
the ground. It was too economically inefficient, otherwise.
And that meant one entity running it. But now, with pieces
being wireless -- the connections are going to be via high-
level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, *ultimately*
there
are going to be wires -- but the wires are just a commodity.
Fiber, wireless. You no longer *need* a utility."
Water utilities? Gas utilities?
Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when
what you're moving is information, instead of physical
substances, then you can play by a different set of rules.
We're evolving those rules now! Hopefully you can have
a much more decentralized system, and one in which
there's more competition in the marketplace.
"The role of government will be to make sure that
nobody cheats. The proverbial 'level playing field.' A
policy that prevents monopolization. It should result in
better service, lower prices, more choices, and local
empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on local
empowerment."
Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision
which he and his allies are working out in considerable
detail and with great energy. Dark, cynical, morbid
cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid considering some of
the darker implications of "decentralized, nonhierarchical,
locally empowered" networking.
I remark that some pundits have suggested that
electronic networking -- faxes, phones, small-scale
photocopiers -- played a strong role in dissolving the
power of centralized communism and causing the
collapse of the Warsaw Pact.
Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh
back from the Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all
by themselves, is rather wishful thinking.
Has it occurred to him that electronic networking
might corrode America's industrial and political
infrastructure to the point where the whole thing becomes
untenable, unworkable -- and the old order just collapses
headlong, like in Eastern Europe?
"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's
extraordinarily
unlikely. In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had
similar hopes about personal computers -- which utterly
failed to materialize." He grins wryly, then his eyes
narrow.
"I'm *very* opposed to techno-utopias. Every time I see
one, I either run away, or try to kill it."
It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to
make the world safe for democracy. He certainly is not
trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians -- least
of
all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists.
What he really hopes to do is make the world safe for
future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized, small-
scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and
brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring
attic
capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.
Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare
combination of visionary intensity with a strong practical
streak. The Board of the EFF: John Barlow, Jerry Berman
of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve
Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West
computer entrepreneurism -- share his gift, his vision, and
his formidable networking talents. They are people of the
1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence and rewarded with
wealth and influence. They are some of the best and the
brightest that the electronic community has to offer. But
can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only
dreaming? They are so few. And there is so much against
them.
I leave Kapor and his networking employees
struggling cheerfully with the promising intricacies of
their
newly installed Macintosh System 7 software. The next
day is Saturday. EFF is closed. I pay a few visits to
points
of interest downtown.
One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.
It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-
and-white speckled granite. It sits in the plaza of the
John
F. Kennedy Federal Building, the very place where Kapor
was once fingerprinted by the FBI.
The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original
telephone. "BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it
reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875, Alexander Graham Bell and
Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires.
"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth
floor garret at what was then 109 Court Street and marked
the beginning of world-wide telephone service."
109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's
plaque, across a street, is one of the central offices of
NYNEX, the local Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.
I cross the street and circle the telco building,
slowly,
hands in my jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New
England autumn day. The central office is a handsome
1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco, eight stories high.
Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck.
The generator strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they
already have their own generators in this eight-story
monster? Then the suspicion strikes me that NYNEX
must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage
which crashed New York City. Belt-and-suspenders, this
generator. Very telco.
Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a
handsome bronze bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers,
and birds, entwining the Bell logo and the legend NEW
ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY
-- an entity which no longer officially exists.
The doors are locked securely. I peer through the
shadowed glass. Inside is an official poster reading:
"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company
ATTENTION
"All persons while on New England Telephone
Company premises are required to visibly wear their
identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2, Page 1).
"Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are
required to visibly wear a daily pass.
"Thank you.
Kevin C. Stanton.
Building Security Coordinator."
Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed
metal security door, a locked delivery entrance. Some
passing stranger has grafitti-tagged this door, with a
single
word in red spray-painted cursive:
*Fury*
#
My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over
now. I have deliberately saved the best for last.
In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy
Roundtable, in Washington, DC. CPSR, Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, was a sister
organization of EFF, or perhaps its aunt, being older and
perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of
politics.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
began in 1981 in Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group
of Californian computer scientists and technicians, united
by nothing more than an electronic mailing list. This
typical high-tech ad-hocracy received the dignity of its
own acronym in 1982, and was formally incorporated in
1983.
CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an
educational outreach effort, sternly warning against any
foolish and unthinking trust in complex computer
systems. CPSR insisted that mere computers should
never be considered a magic panacea for humanity's
social, ethical or political problems. CPSR members were
especially troubled about the stability, safety, and
dependability of military computer systems, and very
especially troubled by those systems controlling nuclear
arsenals. CPSR was best-known for its persistent and well-
publicized attacks on the scientific credibility of the
Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").
In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political
activist group, with over two thousand members in twenty-
one local chapters across the US. It was especially active
in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC, where its
Washington office sponsored the Public Policy
Roundtable.
The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF,
which had passed CPSR an extensive grant for operations.
This was the first large-scale, official meeting of what was
to become the electronic civil libertarian community.
Sixty people attended, myself included -- in this
instance, not so much as a journalist as a cyberpunk
author. Many of the luminaries of the field took part:
Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course. Richard Civille
and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the ACLU.
John Quarterman, author of *The Matrix.* Steven Levy,
author of *Hackers.* George Perry and Sandy Weiss of
Prodigy Services, there to network about the civil-liberties
troubles their young commercial network was
experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo,
manager of the Well. Steve Jackson was there, having
finally found his ideal target audience, and so was Craig
Neidorf, "Knight Lightning" himself, with his attorney,
Sheldon Zenner. Katie Hafner, science journalist, and co-
author of *Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the
Computer Frontier.* Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and
fabled Internet guru. Janlori Goldman of the ACLU's
Project on Privacy and Technology. John Nagle of
Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the House
Judiciary Committee. Tom Guidoboni, the defense
attorney in the Internet Worm case. Lance Hoffman,
computer-science professor at The George Washington
University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host of others
no less distinguished.
Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address,
expressing his determination to keep ahead of the curve
on the issue of electronic free speech. The address was
well-received, and the sense of excitement was palpable.
Every panel discussion was interesting -- some were
entirely compelling. People networked with an almost
frantic interest.
I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch
discussion with Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler
being a former director of the National Security Agency.
As this was the first known encounter between an actual
no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of America's
largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat,
there was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.
Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In
fact all the discussions at the CPSR were officially off-
the-
record, the idea being to do some serious networking in an
atmosphere of complete frankness, rather than to stage a
media circus.
In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting
and intensely valuable, was as nothing compared to the
truly mind-boggling event that transpired a mere month
later.
#
"Computers, Freedom and Privacy." Four hundred
people from every conceivable corner of America's
electronic community. As a science fiction writer, I have
been to some weird gigs in my day, but this thing is truly
*beyond the pale.* Even "Cyberthon," Point Foundation's
"Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area psychedelia
collided headlong with the emergent world of
computerized virtual reality, was like a Kiwanis Club gig
compared to this astonishing do.
The "electronic community" had reached an apogee.
Almost every principal in this book is in attendance. Civil
Libertarians. Computer Cops. The Digital Underground.
Even a few discreet telco people. Colorcoded dots for
lapel tags are distributed. Free Expression issues. Law
Enforcement. Computer Security. Privacy. Journalists.
Lawyers. Educators. Librarians. Programmers. Stylish
punk-black dots for the hackers and phone phreaks.
Almost everyone here seems to wear eight or nine dots, to
have six or seven professional hats.
It is a community. Something like Lebanon perhaps,
but a digital nation. People who had feuded all year in the
national press, people who entertained the deepest
suspicions of one another's motives and ethics, are now in
each others' laps. "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except
for small irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the
convention's token lunatic, a surprising bonhomie
reigned. CFP was like a wedding-party in which two lovers,
unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot in a
clearly disastrous matrimony.
It is clear to both families -- even to neighbors and
random guests -- that this is not a workable relationship,
and yet the young couple's desperate attraction can brook
no further delay. They simply cannot help themselves.
Crockery will fly, shrieks from their newlywed home will
wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a
vulture over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and
there is going to be a child from it. Tragedies end in
death;
comedies in marriage. The Hacker Crackdown is ending
in marriage. And there will be a child.
From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry
Barlow, cyberspace ranger, is here. His color photo in
*The New York Times Magazine,* Barlow scowling in a
grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark hat,
a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost and an
awesome frontier rifle tucked under one arm, will be the
single most striking visual image of the Hacker
Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest of honor -- along with
Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do they
expect these dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?
Barlow delivers the first address.
Uncharacteristically, he is hoarse -- the sheer volume of
roadwork has worn him down. He speaks briefly,
congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his leave
to a storm of applause.
Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly
nervous. She's been on the Well a lot lately. Reading
those Barlow posts. Following Barlow is a challenge to
anyone. In honor of the famous lyricist for the Grateful
Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read -- *a
poem.* A poem she has composed herself.
It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of
Robert W. Service's *The Cremation of Sam McGee,* but
it is in fact, a poem. It's the *Ballad of the Electronic
Frontier!* A poem about the Hacker Crackdown and the
sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes. The
score
or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a
nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is
the funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. The
hackers and civil-libs, who had this woman figured for Ilsa
She-Wolf of the SS, are staring with their jaws hanging
loosely. Never in the wildest reaches of their imagination
had they figured Gail Thackeray was capable of such a
totally off-the-wall move. You can see them punching
their mental CONTROL-RESET buttons. Jesus! This
woman's a hacker weirdo! She's *just like us!* God,
this
changes everything!
Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been
the only cop at the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with
his arm bent by Dorothy Denning. He was guarded and
tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable; a "lion thrown to the
Christians."
At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly
waxes eloquent and even droll, describing the FBI's
"NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital catalog of criminal records,
as if he has suddenly become some weird hybrid of
George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes
an arcane joke about statistical analysis. At least a third
of
the crowd laughs aloud.
"They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse
observes. He had been addressing cops -- *straight* cops,
not computer people. It had been a worthy meeting,