Special Services Center (SSC) or Major Account Center

(MAC) serves as the trouble reporting contact for all

(PSAP) troubles reported by customer. The SSC/MAC

refers troubles to proper organizations for handling and

tracks status of troubles, escalating when necessary.

The SSC/MAC will close out troubles with customer.

The SSC/MAC will analyze all troubles and tracks "chronic"

PSAP troubles.

Corporate Communications Network Center (CCNC) will

test and refer troubles on all node to host circuits.

All E911 circuits are classified as official company property.

The Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center

(MMOC) maintains the E911 (ALI/DMS) computer

hardware at the Host site. This MMOC is also responsible

for monitoring the system and reporting certain PSAP

and system problems to the local MMOC's, SCC's or

SSC/MAC's. The MMOC personnel also operate software

programs that maintain the TN data base under the

direction of the E911 Center. The maintenance of the

NODE computer (the interface between the PSAP and the

ALI/DMS computer) is a function of the MMOC at the

NODE site. The MMOC's at the NODE sites may also be

involved in the testing of NODE to Host circuits.

The MMOC will also assist on Host to PSAP and data network

related troubles not resolved through standard trouble

clearing procedures.

Installation And Maintenance Center (IMC) is responsible

for referral of E911 subscriber troubles that are not subscriber

line problems.

E911 Center - Performs the role of System Administration

and is responsible for overall operation of the E911

computer software. The E911 Center does A-Z trouble

analysis and provides statistical information on the

performance of the system.

This analysis includes processing PSAP inquiries (trouble

reports) and referral of network troubles. The E911 Center

also performs daily processing of tandem recent change

and provides information to the RCMAC for tandem input.

The E911 Center is responsible for daily processing

of the ALI/DMS computer data base and provides error files,

etc. to the Customer Services department for investigation and correction.

The E911 Center participates in all system implementations and on-going

maintenance effort and assists in the development of procedures,

training and education of information to all groups.

Any group receiving a 911 trouble from the SSC/MAC should

close out the trouble with the SSC/MAC or provide a status

if the trouble has been referred to another group.

This will allow the SSC/MAC to provide a status back

to the customer or escalate as appropriate.

Any group receiving a trouble from the Host site (MMOC

or CCNC) should close the trouble back to that group.

The MMOC should notify the appropriate SSC/MAC

when the Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down so that

the SSC/MAC can reply to customer reports that may be

called in by the PSAPs. This will eliminate duplicate

reporting of troubles. On complete outages the MMOC

will follow escalation procedures for a Node after two (2)

hours and for a PSAP after four (4) hours. Additionally the

MMOC will notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the

Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down.

The PSAP will call the SSC/MAC to report E911 troubles.

The person reporting the E911 trouble may not have a

circuit I.D. and will therefore report the PSAP name and

address. Many PSAP troubles are not circuit specific. In

those instances where the caller cannot provide a circuit

I.D., the SSC/MAC will be required to determine the

circuit I.D. using the PSAP profile. Under no circumstances

will the SSC/MAC Center refuse to take the trouble.

The E911 trouble should be handled as quickly as possible,

with the SSC/MAC providing as much assistance as

possible while taking the trouble report from the caller.

The SSC/MAC will screen/test the trouble to determine the

appropriate handoff organization based on the following criteria:

PSAP equipment problem: SSIM/I&M

Circuit problem: SSC/MAC

Voice network problem: SCC (report trunk group number)

Problem affecting multiple PSAPs (No ALI report from

all PSAPs): Contact the MMOC to check for NODE or

Host computer problems before further testing.

The SSC/MAC will track the status of reported troubles

and escalate as appropriate. The SSC/MAC will close out

customer/company reports with the initiating contact.

Groups with specific maintenance responsibilities,

defined above, will investigate "chronic" troubles upon

request from the SSC/MAC and the ongoing maintenance subcommittee.

All "out of service" E911 troubles are priority one type reports.

One link down to a PSAP is considered a priority one trouble

and should be handled as if the PSAP was isolated.

The PSAP will report troubles with the ANI controller, ALI

controller or set equipment to the SSC/MAC.

NO ANI: Where the PSAP reports NO ANI (digital

display screen is blank) ask if this condition exists on all

screens and on all calls. It is important to differentiate

between blank screens and screens displaying 911-00XX,

or all zeroes.

When the PSAP reports all screens on all calls, ask if there

is any voice contact with callers. If there is no voice

contact the trouble should be referred to the SCC

immediately since 911 calls are not getting through which

may require alternate routing of calls to another PSAP.

When the PSAP reports this condition on all screens

but not all calls and has voice contact with callers,

the report should be referred to SSIM/I&M for dispatch.

The SSC/MAC should verify with the SCC that ANI

is pulsing before dispatching SSIM.

When the PSAP reports this condition on one screen for

all calls (others work fine) the trouble should be referred

to SSIM/I&M for dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to

one piece of equipment at the customer premise.

An ANI failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ANI has

not been received by the PSAP from the tandem office or

was lost by the PSAP ANI controller. The PSAP may

receive "02" alarms which can be caused by the ANI

controller logging more than three all zero failures on the

same trunk. The PSAP has been instructed to report this

condition to the SSC/MAC since it could indicate an

equipment trouble at the PSAP which might be affecting

all subscribers calling into the PSAP. When all zeroes are

being received on all calls or "02" alarms continue, a tester

should analyze the condition to determine the appropriate

action to be taken. The tester must perform cooperative

testing with the SCC when there appears to be a problem

on the Tandem-PSAP trunks before requesting dispatch.

When an occasional all zero condition is reported,

the SSC/MAC should dispatch SSIM/I&M to routine

equipment on a "chronic" troublesweep.

The PSAPs are instructed to report incidental ANI failures

to the BOC on a PSAP inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that

is sent to the Customer Services E911 group and forwarded

to E911 center when required. This usually involves only a

particular telephone number and is not a condition that

would require a report to the SSC/MAC. Multiple ANI

failures which our from the same end office (XX denotes

end office), indicate a hard trouble condition may exist

in the end office or end office tandem trunks. The PSAP will

report this type of condition to the SSC/MAC and the

SSC/MAC should refer the report to the SCC responsible

for the tandem office. NOTE: XX is the ESCO (Emergency

Service Number) associated with the incoming 911 trunks

into the tandem. It is important that the C/MAC tell the

SCC what is displayed at the PSAP (i.e. 911-0011) which

indicates to the SCC which end office is in trouble.

Note: It is essential that the PSAP fill out inquiry form

on every ANI failure.

The PSAP will report a trouble any time an address is not

received on an address display (screen blank) E911 call.

(If a record is not in the 911 data base or an ANI failure

is encountered, the screen will provide a display noticing

such condition). The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP

whether the NO ALI condition is on one screen or all screens.

When the condition is on one screen (other screens

receive ALI information) the SSC/MAC will request

SSIM/I&M to dispatch.

If no screens are receiving ALI information, there is usually

a circuit trouble between the PSAP and the Host computer.

The SSC/MAC should test the trouble and refer for restoral.

Note: If the SSC/MAC receives calls from multiple

PSAP's, all of which are receiving NO ALI, there is a

problem with the Node or Node to Host circuits or the

Host computer itself. Before referring the trouble the

SSC/MAC should call the MMOC to inquire if the Node

or Host is in trouble.

Alarm conditions on the ANI controller digital display at

the PSAP are to be reported by the PSAP's. These alarms

can indicate various trouble conditions so the SSC/MAC

should ask the PSAP if any portion of the E911 system

is not functioning properly.

The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP attendant that

the equipment's primary function is answering E911 calls.

If it is, the SSC/MAC should request a dispatch SSIM/I&M.

If the equipment is not primarily used for E911,

then the SSC/MAC should advise PSAP to contact their CPE vendor.

Note: These troubles can be quite confusing when the

PSAP has vendor equipment mixed in with equipment

that the BOC maintains. The Marketing representative

should provide the SSC/MAC information concerning any

unusual or exception items where the PSAP should

contact their vendor. This information should be included

in the PSAP profile sheets.

ANI or ALI controller down: When the host computer sees

the PSAP equipment down and it does not come back up,

the MMOC will report the trouble to the SSC/MAC;

the equipment is down at the PSAP, a dispatch will be required.

PSAP link (circuit) down: The MMOC will provide the

SSC/MAC with the circuit ID that the Host computer

indicates in trouble. Although each PSAP has two circuits,

when either circuit is down the condition must be treated

as an emergency since failure of the second circuit will

cause the PSAP to be isolated.

Any problems that the MMOC identifies from the Node

location to the Host computer will be handled directly

with the appropriate MMOC(s)/CCNC.

Note: The customer will call only when a problem is

apparent to the PSAP. When only one circuit is down to

the PSAP, the customer may not be aware there is a

trouble, even though there is one link down,

notification should appear on the PSAP screen.

Troubles called into the SSC/MAC from the MMOC

or other company employee should not be closed out

by calling the PSAP since it may result in the

customer responding that they do not have a trouble.

These reports can only be closed out by receiving

information that the trouble was fixed and by checking

with the company employee that reported the trouble.

The MMOC personnel will be able to verify that the

trouble has cleared by reviewing a printout from the host.

When the CRSAB receives a subscriber complaint

(i.e., cannot dial 911) the RSA should obtain as much

information as possible while the customer is on the line.

For example, what happened when the subscriber dialed 911?

The report is automatically directed to the IMC for subscriber line testing.

When no line trouble is found, the IMC will refer the trouble condition

to the SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC will contact Customer Services E911 Group

and verify that the subscriber should be able to call 911 and obtain the ESN.

The SSC/MAC will verify the ESN via 2SCCS. When both verifications match,

the SSC/MAC will refer the report to the SCC responsible for the 911 tandem

office for investigation and resolution. The MAC is responsible for tracking

the trouble and informing the IMC when it is resolved.

For more information, please refer to E911 Glossary of Terms.

End of Phrack File

_____________________________________

The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read

this document. John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense,

in "Crime and Puzzlement:" "Bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity. . . .

To read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires

either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like one.

Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly had altered his consciousness

beyond the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or Tolstoy. . . .

the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a student

of advanced organizational sclerosis."

With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was published

(in its six-page edited form) in Phrack, the reader may be able to verify

a few statements of fact about its nature. First, there is no software,

no computer code, in the Document. It is not computer-programming language

like FORTRAN or C++, it is English; all the sentences have nouns and verbs

and punctuation. It does not explain how to break into the E911 system.

It does not suggest ways to destroy or damage the E911 system.

There are no access codes in the Document. There are no computer passwords.

It does not explain how to steal long distance service. It does not explain

how to break in to telco switching stations. There is nothing in it about

using a personal computer or a modem for any purpose at all, good or bad.

Close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery.

The E911 Document is about ADMINISTRATION. It describes how one creates

and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy:

Special Service Centers and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC).

It describes how these centers should distribute responsibility

for the E911 service, to other units of telco bureaucracy,

in a chain of command, a formal hierarchy. It describes

who answers customer complaints, who screens calls,

who reports equipment failures, who answers those reports,

who handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees,

who gives orders, who follows orders, WHO tells WHOM what to do.

The Document is not a "roadmap" to computers.

The Document is a roadmap to PEOPLE.

As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is USELESS.

As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people, however, the Document

might prove handy (especially with its Glossary, which I have not included).

An intense and protracted study of this Document and its Glossary,

combined with many other such documents, might teach one to speak like

a telco employee. And telco people live by SPEECH--they live by phone

communication. If you can mimic their language over the phone,

you can "social-engineer" them. If you can con telco people, you can

wreak havoc among them. You can force them to no longer trust one another;

you can break the telephonic ties that bind their community; you can make

them paranoid. And people will fight harder to defend their community

than they will fight to defend their individual selves.

This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by Phrack magazine.

The real struggle was over the control of telco language,

the control of telco knowledge. It was a struggle to defend the social

"membrane of differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco

community's ivory tower --the special jargon that allows telco

professionals to recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans,

thieves, and upstarts. And the prosecution brought out this fact.

They repeatedly made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals

by hackers using "social engineering."

However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like

a professional telecommunications expert. Craig Neidorf was on trial

for access device fraud and transportation of stolen property.

He was on trial for stealing a document that was purportedly

highly sensitive and purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars.

#

John Nagle read the E911 Document. He drew his own conclusions.

And he presented Zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box

of similar material, drawn mostly from Stanford University's

engineering libraries. During the trial, the defense team--Zenner,

half-a-dozen other attorneys, Nagle, Neidorf, and computer-security

expert Dorothy Denning, all pored over the E911 Document line-by-line.

On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-examine

a woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for Southern Bell

in Atlanta. Ms. Williams had been responsible for the E911 Document.

(She was not its author--its original "author" was a Southern Bell

staff manager named Richard Helms. However, Mr. Helms should not bear

the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance personnel

had amended the Document. It had not been so much "written" by a

single author, as built by committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.)

Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution,

and had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure

of the E911 system, aided by charts.

Now it was Zenner's turn. He first established that the

"proprietary stamp" that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document

was stamped on EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT that BellSouth wrote--

THOUSANDS of documents. "We do not publish anything other

than for our own company," Ms. Williams explained.

"Any company document of this nature is considered proprietary."

Nobody was in charge of singling out special high-security publications

for special high-security protection. They were ALL special,

no matter how trivial, no matter what their subject matter--

the stamp was put on as soon as any document was written,

and the stamp was never removed.

Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain

the mechanics of E911 system were "proprietary," too.

Were they PUBLIC INFORMATION, these charts, all about PSAPs,

ALIs, nodes, local end switches? Could he take the charts out

in the street and show them to anybody, "without violating

some proprietary notion that BellSouth has?"

Ms Williams showed some confusion, but finally areed that the charts were,

in fact, public.

"But isn't this what you said was basically what appeared in Phrack?"

Ms. Williams denied this.

Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as published in Phrack

was only half the size of the original E911 Document (as Prophet

had purloined it). Half of it had been deleted--edited by Neidorf.

Ms. Williams countered that "Most of the information that is

in the text file is redundant."

Zenner continued to probe. Exactly what bits of knowledge in the Document

were, in fact, unknown to the public? Locations of E911 computers?

Phone numbers for telco personnel? Ongoing maintenance subcommittees?

Hadn't Neidorf removed much of this?

Then he pounced. "Are you familiar with Bellcore Technical Reference

Document TR-TSY-000350?" It was, Zenner explained, officially titled

"E911 Public Safety Answering Point Interface Between 1-1AESS Switch

and Customer Premises Equipment." It contained highly detailed

and specific technical information about the E911 System.

It was published by Bellcore and publicly available for about $20.

He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed thousands

of documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells, BellSouth included.

The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free. Anyone with a credit card

could call the Bellcore toll-free 800 number and simply order any

of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer without question.

Including, for instance, "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces to

Customer Premises Equipment at a Public Safety Answering Point."

Zenner gave the witness a copy of "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces,"

which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from the catalog.

"Look at it carefully," he urged Ms. Williams, "and tell me

if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed information

about the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared anywhere in Phrack."

"You want me to. . . ." Ms. Williams trailed off. "I don't understand."

"Take a careful look," Zenner persisted. "Take a look at that document,

and tell me when you're done looking at it if, indeed, it doesn't contain

much more detailed information about the E911 system than appeared in Phrack."

"Phrack wasn't taken from this," Ms. Williams said.

"Excuse me?" said Zenner.

"Phrack wasn't taken from this."

"I can't hear you," Zenner said.

"Phrack was not taken from this document. I don't understand

your question to me."

"I guess you don't," Zenner said.

At this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot.

Ms. Williams was distressed. Her confusion was quite genuine.

Phrack had not been taken from any publicly available Bellcore document.

Phrack's E911 Document had been stolen from her own company's computers,

from her own company's text files, that her own colleagues had written,

and revised, with much labor.

But the "value" of the Document had been blown to smithereens.

It wasn't worth eighty grand. According to Bellcore it was worth

thirteen bucks. And the looming menace that it supposedly posed

had been reduced in instants to a scarecrow. Bellcore itself

was selling material far more detailed and "dangerous,"

to anybody with a credit card and a phone.

Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody.

They gave it to ANYBODY WHO ASKED, but not many did ask.

Not many people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog and an 800 number.

John Nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn't know.

"Tuc," a friend of Neidorf's and sometime Phrack contributor, knew,

and Tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes.

But the Legion of Doom didn't know--otherwise, they would never

have wasted so much time raiding dumpsters. Cook didn't know.

Foley didn't know. Kluepfel didn't know. The right hand

of Bellcore knew not what the left hand was doing. The right

hand was battering hackers without mercy, while the left hand

was distributing Bellcore's intellectual property to anybody

who was interested in telephone technical trivia--apparently,

a pathetic few.

The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized

that they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches.

The ivory tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog

of its own technical obscurity that it had left all the

windows open and flung open the doors. No one had even noticed.

Zenner sank another nail in the coffin. He produced a printed issue

of Telephone Engineer & Management, a prominent industry journal

that comes out twice a month and costs $27 a year. This particular issue

of TE&M, called "Update on 911," featured a galaxy of technical details

on 911 service and a glossary far more extensive than Phrack's.

The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum.

Tim Foley testified about his interrogations of Neidorf.

Neidorf's written admission that he had known the E911 Document

was pilfered was officially read into the court record.

An interesting side issue came up: "Terminus" had once passed Neidorf

a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence, that had been cunningly

altered so that it could trap passwords. The UNIX software itself was

illegally copied AT&T property, and the alterations "Terminus" had made to it,

had transformed it into a device for facilitating computer break-ins. Terminus

himself would eventually plead guilty to theft of this piece of software,

and the Chicago group would send Terminus to prison for it. But it was

of dubious relevance in the Neidorf case. Neidorf hadn't written the program.

He wasn't accused of ever having used it. And Neidorf wasn't being charged

with software theft or owning a password trapper.

On the next day, Zenner took the offensive. The civil libertarians

now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into action--

the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 US Code,

Section 2701 et seq. Section 2701 makes it a crime to intentionally

access without authorization a facility in which an electronic communication

service is provided--it is, at heart, an anti-bugging and anti-tapping law,

intended to carry the traditional protections of telephones into other

electronic channels of communication. While providing penalties for amateur

snoops, however, Section 2703 of the ECPA also lays some formal difficulties

on the bugging and tapping activities of police.

The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had served Richard Andrews

with a federal grand jury subpoena, in their pursuit of Prophet,

the E911 Document, and the Terminus software ring. But according to

the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a "provider of remote

computing service" was legally entitled to "prior notice" from

the government if a subpoena was used. Richard Andrews and his

basement UNIX node, Jolnet, had not received any "prior notice."

Tim Foley had purportedly violated the ECPA and committed

an electronic crime! Zenner now sought the judge's permission

to cross-examine Foley on the topic of Foley's own electronic misdeeds.

Cook argued that Richard Andrews' Jolnet was a privately owned

bulletin board, and not within the purview of ECPA. Judge Bua

granted the motion of the government to prevent cross-examination

on that point, and Zenner's offensive fizzled. This, however,

was the first direct assault on the legality of the actions

of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force itself--

the first suggestion that they themselves had broken the law,

and might, perhaps, be called to account.

Zenner, in any case, did not really need the ECPA.

Instead, he grilled Foley on the glaring contradictions in

the supposed value of the E911 Document. He also brought up

the embarrassing fact that the supposedly red-hot E911 Document

had been sitting around for months, in Jolnet, with Kluepfel's knowledge,

while Kluepfel had done nothing about it.

In the afternoon, the Prophet was brought in to testify

for the prosecution. (The Prophet, it will be recalled,

had also been indicted in the case as partner in a fraud

scheme with Neidorf.) In Atlanta, the Prophet had already

pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy, one charge of wire fraud

and one charge of interstate transportation of stolen property.

The wire fraud charge, and the stolen property charge,

were both directly based on the E911 Document.

The twenty-year-old Prophet proved a sorry customer,

answering questions politely but in a barely audible mumble,

his voice trailing off at the ends of sentences.

He was constantly urged to speak up.

Cook, examining Prophet, forced him to admit that

he had once had a "drug problem," abusing amphetamines,

marijuana, cocaine, and LSD. This may have established

to the jury that "hackers" are, or can be, seedy lowlife characters,

but it may have damaged Prophet's credibility somewhat.

Zenner later suggested that drugs might have damaged Prophet's memory.

The interesting fact also surfaced that Prophet had never

physically met Craig Neidorf. He didn't even know

Neidorf's last name--at least, not until the trial.

Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career.

He was a member of the Legion of Doom. He had abused codes,

he had broken into switching stations and re-routed calls,

he had hung out on pirate bulletin boards. He had raided

the BellSouth AIMSX computer, copied the E911 Document,

stored it on Jolnet, mailed it to Neidorf. He and Neidorf

had edited it, and Neidorf had known where it came from.

Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not a member

of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to break into

BellSouth computers. Neidorf had never urged Prophet to defraud anyone,

or to steal anything. Prophet also admitted that he had never known Neidorf

to break in to any computer. Prophet said that no one in the Legion of Doom

considered Craig Neidorf a "hacker" at all. Neidorf was not a UNIX maven,

and simply lacked the necessary skill and ability to break into computers.

Neidorf just published a magazine.

On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf collapsed.

Cook moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently

available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the trial."

Judge Bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he described as

"very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a mistrial.

Neidorf was a free man. His defense, however, had cost himself

and his family dearly. Months of his life had been consumed in anguish;

he had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal.

He owed his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite

a generous payment to the defense by Mitch Kapor.

Neidorf was not found innocent. The trial was simply dropped.

Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted Neidorf's

motion for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record.

The United States Secret Service was ordered to delete and destroy

all fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest

or processing relating to Neidorf's indictment, including

their paper documents and their computer records.

Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a lawyer.

Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf lost much of his enthusiasm

for merely technical power. At this writing, Craig Neidorf is working

in Washington as a salaried researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union.

#

The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF

from voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings

of the new frontier.

Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph

for anyone concerned. No constitutional principles had been established.

The issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers remained

in legal limbo. There were public misconceptions about the case.

Many people thought Neidorf had been found innocent and relieved

of all his legal debts by Kapor. The truth was that the government

had simply dropped the case, and Neidorf's family had gone deeply

into hock to support him.

But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public sound-bite:

THE FEDS SAID IT WAS WORTH EIGHTY GRAND, AND IT WAS ONLY WORTH THIRTEEN BUCKS.

This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element. No serious report

of the case missed this particular element. Even cops could not read this

without a wince and a shake of the head. It left the public credibility

of the crackdown agents in tatters.

The crackdown, in fact, continued, however. Those two charges

against Prophet, which had been based on the E911 Document,

were quietly forgotten at his sentencing--even though Prophet

had already pled guilty to them. Georgia federal prosecutors

strongly argued for jail time for the Atlanta Three, insisting on

"the need to send a message to the community," "the message that

hackers around the country need to hear."

There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum

about the awful things that various other hackers had done

(though the Atlanta Three themselves had not, in fact,

actually committed these crimes). There was also much

speculation about the awful things that the Atlanta Three

MIGHT have done and WERE CAPABLE of doing (even though

they had not, in fact, actually done them).

The prosecution's argument carried the day.

The Atlanta Three were sent to prison:

Urvile and Leftist both got 14 months each,

while Prophet (a second offender) got 21 months.

The Atlanta Three were also assessed staggering fines as "restitution":

$233,000 each. BellSouth claimed that the defendants had "stolen"

"approximately $233,880 worth" of "proprietary computer access information"--

specifically, $233,880 worth of computer passwords and connect addresses.

BellSouth's astonishing claim of the extreme value of its own computer

passwords and addresses was accepted at face value by the Georgia court.

Furthermore (as if to emphasize its theoretical nature) this enormous sum

was not divvied up among the Atlanta Three, but each of them had to pay

all of it.

A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta Three were

specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under supervision.

Depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes some sense if one

considers hackers as "computer addicts," but EFF, filing an amicus brief

in the case, protested that this punishment was unconstitutional--

it deprived the Atlanta Three of their rights of free association

and free expression through electronic media.

Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a year

through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task Force. His crime,

to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the UNIX password trapper,

which was officially valued by AT&T at $77,000, a figure which aroused

intense skepticism among those familiar with UNIX "login.c" programs.

The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of Doom, however,

did not cause the EFF any sense of embarrassment or defeat.

On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering strength.

An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy,

Democrat from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor

of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Even before

the Neidorf trial, Leahy had spoken out in defense of hacker-power

and freedom of the keyboard: "We cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive

13-year-old who, if left to experiment today, may tomorrow develop

the telecommunications or computer technology to lead the United States

into the 21st century. He represents our future and our best hope

to remain a technologically competitive nation."

It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective

by the fact that the crackdown raiders DID NOT HAVE any Senators

speaking out for THEM. On the contrary, their highly secretive

actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and

"confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won

them a burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling

them in the on-going propaganda war. Gail Thackeray was reduced

to unsupported bluster: "Some of these people who are loudest

on the bandwagon may just slink into the background,"

she predicted in Newsweek--when all the facts came out,

and the cops were vindicated.

But all the facts did not come out. Those facts that did,

were not very flattering. And the cops were not vindicated.

And Gail Thackeray lost her job. By the end of 1991,

William Cook had also left public employment.

1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents

were in severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll.

People were flocking to the cause.

A particularly interesting ally had been Mike Godwin of Austin, Texas.

Godwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as Barlow;

he had been editor of the student newspaper of the University of Texas,

and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and in 1990 was back

in law school, looking for a law degree.

Godwin was also a bulletin board maven. He was very well-known

in the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny Mnemonic,"

which he adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by William Gibson.

Godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan. As a fellow Austinite

of similar age and similar interests, I myself had known Godwin socially

for many years. When William Gibson and myself had been writing our

collaborative SF novel, The Difference Engine, Godwin had been our

technical advisor in our effort to link our Apple word-processors

from Austin to Vancouver. Gibson and I were so pleased by his generous

expert help that we named a character in the novel "Michael Godwin"

in his honor.

The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well. His erudition

and his mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor;

his ardent curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate

and argue seemed the central drive of his life. Godwin had even

started his own Austin debating society, wryly known as the

"Dull Men's Club." In person, Godwin could be overwhelming;

a flypaper-brained polymath who could not seem to let any idea go.

On bulletin boards, however, Godwin's closely reasoned,

highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium well,

and he became a local board celebrity.

Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public national exposure

of the Steve Jackson case. The Izenberg seizure in Austin had received

no press coverage at all. The March 1 raids on Mentor, Bloodaxe, and

Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page splash in the

front page of the Austin American-Statesman, but it was confused

and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the Secret Service

wasn't talking. Steve Jackson seemed doomed to obscurity.

Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any crime;

he was not on trial. He had lost some computers in an ongoing

investigation--so what? Jackson tried hard to attract attention

to the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank;

no one in a position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip

on the issues.

Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified

to carry Jackson's case to the outside world. Godwin was

a board enthusiast, a science fiction fan, a former journalist,

a computer salesman, a lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite.

Through a coincidence yet more amazing, in his last year

of law school Godwin had specialized in federal prosecutions

and criminal procedure. Acting entirely on his own, Godwin made

up a press packet which summarized the issues and provided useful

contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes effort

(which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board debate)

broke the story again in the Austin American-Statesman and then in Newsweek.

Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that. As he joined the growing

civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to all parties involved

that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and confusion,

GENUINELY UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING HE WAS TALKING ABOUT. The disparate elements

of Godwin's dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly as

the facets of a Rubik's cube.

When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney,

Godwin was the obvious choice. He took the Texas bar exam,

left Austin, moved to Cambridge, became a full-time, professional,

computer civil libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf

of EFF, delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds

as disparate as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans,

and federal cops.

Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of

the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#

Another early and influential participant in the controversy

was Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was unique among investigators

of the computer underground in that she did not enter the debate

with any set of politicized motives. She was a professional

cryptographer and computer security expert whose primary interest

in hackers was SCHOLARLY. She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics,

and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue. She had worked for SRI

International, the California think-tank that was also the home of

computer-security maven Donn Parker, and had authored an influential text

called Cryptography and Data Security. In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for

Digital Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center. Her husband,

Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert, working for NASA's

Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science. He had edited the

well-received Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms and Viruses.

Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground,

more or less with an anthropological interest. There she discovered

that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized

as unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society,

did in fact have their own subculture and their own rules.

They were not particularly well-considered rules, but they were,

in fact, rules. Basically, they didn't take money and they

didn't break anything.

Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal

to influence serious-minded computer professionals--the sort

of people who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace

rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow.

For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy Denning

was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this neatly coiffed,

conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded most

hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an IBM systems

programmer with profound expertise in computer architectures

and high-security information flow, who had personal friends

in the FBI and the National Security Agency.

Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American mathematical

intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks

of the computer-science elite. And here she was, gently questioning

twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical

implications of their behavior.

Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very straight

and did their best to keep the anarchy-file stuff down to a faint whiff

of brimstone. Nevertheless, the hackers WERE in fact prepared to seriously

discuss serious issues with Dorothy Denning. They were willing to speak

the unspeakable and defend the indefensible, to blurt out their convictions

that information cannot be owned, that the databases of governments and large

corporations were a threat to the rights and privacy of individuals.

Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking"

was not simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics.

"Hacking" was not an aberrant menace that could be charmed away

by ignoring it, or swept out of existence by jailing a few ringleaders.

Instead, "hacking" was symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over

knowledge and power in the age of information.

Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least partially

shared by forward-looking management theorists in the business community:

people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter Drucker, in his book

The New Realities, had stated that "control of information by the government

is no longer possible. Indeed, information is now transnational.

Like money, it has no `fatherland.'"

And management maven Tom Peters had chided large corporations for uptight,

proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, Thriving on Chaos:

"Information hoarding, especially by politically motivated,

power-seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout American industry,

service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible

millstone aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."

Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membrane of the

digital underground. She attended the Neidorf trial,

where she was prepared to testify for the defense as an expert witness.

She was a behind-the-scenes organizer of two of the most important

national meetings of the computer civil libertarians. Though not

a zealot of any description, she brought disparate elements of the

electronic community into a surprising and fruitful collusion.

Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the Computer Science Department

at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

#

There were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian community.

There's no question, however, that its single most influential figure

was Mitchell D. Kapor. Other people might have formal titles,

or governmental positions, have more experience with crime,

or with the law, or with the arcanities of computer security

or constitutional theory. But by 1991 Kapor had transcended

any such narrow role. Kapor had become "Mitch."

Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-hocrat.

Mitch had stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly,

vigorously and angrily, he had put his own reputation,

and his very considerable personal fortune, on the line.

By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known advocate of his cause

and was known PERSONALLY by almost every single human being in America

with any direct influence on the question of civil liberties in cyberspace.

Mitch had built bridges, crossed voids, changed paradigms, forged metaphors,

made phone-calls and swapped business cards to such spectacular effect

that it had become impossible for anyone to take any action in the

"hacker question" without wondering what Mitch might think--

and say--and tell his friends.

The EFF had simply NETWORKED the situation into an entirely new status quo.

And in fact this had been EFF's deliberate strategy from the beginning.

Both Barlow and Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had deliberately

chosen to work almost entirely through the electronic spiderweb of

"valuable personal contacts."

After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every reason

to look back with satisfaction. EFF had established its own Internet node,

"eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic archive of documents on

electronic civil rights, privacy issues, and academic freedom.

EFF was also publishing EFFector, a quarterly printed journal,

as well as EFFector Online, an electronic newsletter with

over 1,200 subscribers. And EFF was thriving on the Well.

EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-time staff.

It had become a membership organization and was attracting

grass-roots support. It had also attracted the support

of some thirty civil-rights lawyers, ready and eager

to do pro bono work in defense of the Constitution in Cyberspace.

EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in Massachusetts

to change state and federal legislation on computer networking.

Kapor in particular had become a veteran expert witness,

and had joined the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

of the National Academy of Science and Engineering.

EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"

and the CPSR Roundtable. It had carried out a press offensive that,

in the words of EFFector, "has affected the climate of opinion about

computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into

`hacker hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."

It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.

And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic Frontier Foundation

had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of Steve Jackson,

Steve Jackson Games Inc., and three users of the Illuminati

bulletin board system. The defendants were, and are,

the United States Secret Service, William Cook, Tim Foley,

Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.

The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin federal court

as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress

alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments to the

United States Constitution, as well as the Privacy Protection Act

of 1980 (42 USC 2000aa et seq.), and the Electronic Communications

Privacy Act (18 USC 2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).

EFF had established that it had credibility. It had also established

that it had teeth.

In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak personally

with Mitch Kapor. It was my final interview for this book.

#

The city of Boston has always been one of the major intellectual centers

of the American republic. It is a very old city by American standards,

a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyards,

where the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-exist with the

hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old Ironsides," the USS CONSTITUTION.

The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest armed clashes

of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's environs. Today there is

a monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout much of the city.

The willingness of the republican revolutionaries to take up arms and fire

on their oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two full centuries

have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still a potent center of American political

symbolism, and the Spirit of '76 is still a potent image for those who seek

to mold public opinion.

Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily

a patriot. When I visited the spire in September 1991, it bore a huge,

badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading

"BRITS OUT--IRA PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was

a glass-cased diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers,

rebels and redcoats, fighting and dying over the green hill,

the riverside marshes, the rebel trenchworks. Plaques indicated the

movement of troops, the shiftings of strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument

is occupied at its very center by the toy soldiers of a military

war-game simulation.

The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities,

prominent among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

where the term "computer hacker" was first coined. The Hacker Crackdown

of 1990 might be interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:

traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism,

such as Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the bare-knuckle

industrial pragmatism of Chicago and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York

wrapped in internal struggle).

The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on

155 Second Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north

of the River Charles. Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented,

sagging brick and elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn

"NO PARKING DURING DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY." This is an old area

of modest manufacturing industries; the EFF is catecorner from the

Greene Rubber Company. EFF's building is two stories of red brick;

its large wooden windows feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills.

The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears three sheets

of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass. They read:

ON Technology. EFF. KEI.

"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which currently specializes

in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh computer. "Groupware" is intended

to promote efficient social interaction among office-workers linked

by computers. ON Technology's most successful software products to date

are "Meeting Maker" and "Instant Update."

"KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal holding company,

the commercial entity that formally controls his extensive investments

in other hardware and software corporations.

"EFF" is a political action group--of a special sort.

Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails

of a modest flight of stairs. A wall of modish glass brick

separates this anteroom from the offices. Beyond the brick,

there's an alarm system mounted on the wall, a sleek, complex little

number that resembles a cross between a thermostat and a CD player.

Piled against the wall are box after box of a recent special issue

of Scientific American, "How to Work, Play, and Thrive in Cyberspace,"

with extensive coverage of electronic networking techniques

and political issues, including an article by Kapor himself.

These boxes are addressed to Gerard Van der Leun, EFF's

Director of Communications, who will shortly mail those magazines

to every member of the EFF.

The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON Technology,

which Kapor currently rents, is a modestly bustling place.

It's very much the same physical size as Steve Jackson's gaming company.

It's certainly a far cry from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway

shipping barn, on the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned

by Lotus Development Corporation.

Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell Kapor founded

in the late 70s. The software program Kapor co-authored,

"Lotus 1-2-3," is still that company's most profitable product.

"Lotus 1-2-3" also bears a singular distinction in the

digital underground: it's probably the most pirated piece

of application software in world history.

Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall.

Kapor, whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his early forties,

married and the father of two. He has a round face, high forehead,

straight nose, a slightly tousled mop of black hair peppered with gray.

His large brown eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful.

He disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts and tropical prints,

not so much garish as simply cheerful and just that little bit anomalous.

There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch Kapor.

He may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather, guitar-strumming

charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's

something about the guy that still stops one short. He has the air

of the Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy,

Longfellow-quoting poker shark who only HAPPENS to know

the exact mathematical odds against drawing to an inside straight.

Even among his computer-community colleagues, who are hardly known

for mental sluggishness, Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very

intelligent man. He speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures,

his Boston accent sometimes slipping to the sharp nasal tang

of his youth in Long Island.

Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much of his philanthropic work,

is a strong supporter of Boston's Computer Museum. Kapor's interest

in the history of his industry has brought him some remarkable curios,

such as the "byte" just outside his office door. This "byte"--

eight digital bits--has been salvaged from the wreck of an

electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. It's a standing gunmetal

rack about the size of a small toaster-oven: with eight slots

of hand-soldered breadboarding featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes.

If it fell off a table it could easily break your foot,

but it was state-of-the-art computation in the 1940s.

(It would take exactly 157,184 of these primordial toasters

to hold the first part of this book.)

There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that some

inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of transistors,

capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring.

Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little

mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh IIfx.

If its giant screen were an open window, an agile person

could climb through it without much trouble at all.

There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow, a memento of his

recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a black-and-white

stencilled photo and the legend CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR.

It's Kapor, Barlow, and two California venture-capitalist luminaries

of their acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer

dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags,

standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the formerly Iron Curtain.

They look as if they're having the absolute time of their lives.

Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about his youth--

high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays attending Columbia University's

high-school science honors program, where he had his first experience

programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66. "I was very interested,"

says Kapor, "and then I went off to college and got distracted by drugs sex

and rock and roll, like anybody with half a brain would have then!"

After college he was a progressive-rock DJ in Hartford, Connecticut,

for a couple of years.

I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days--if he ever wished

he could go back to radio work.

He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about going back

to be a DJ the day after Altamont."

Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes in COBOL.

He hated it. He quit and became a teacher of transcendental meditation.

(It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that gave the

world "Lotus.")

In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental Meditation

movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz. It was

an all-male group--a hundred and twenty of them--determined upon

Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the transcendant his best shot.

He was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization."

"They were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the floor.

His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "THEY DON'T LEVITATE."

Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and acquired a degree

in counselling psychology. He worked a while in a hospital,

couldn't stand that either. "My rep was," he says "a very bright kid

with a lot of potential who hasn't found himself. Almost thirty.

Sort of lost."

Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer--an Apple II.

He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New Hampshire to avoid the

sales tax.

"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out

in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties,

well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the salesman.

He didn't know anything about computers. I'd had a year programming.

And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I went up to him,

and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant." He pauses.

"I don't know where I got the nerve to do this. It was uncharacteristic.

I just said, `I think I can help you, I've been listening,

this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for you.'

And he took me on! He was my first client! I became a computer

consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."

Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted more clients

for his consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.

A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT,

had a problem. He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of

financial statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue

for time on MIT's mainframes. (One might note at this point that if

Mr. Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes,

Kapor himself might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and

the PC business might have been set back for years!)

Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however,

and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down.

Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.

It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue,

that it might be possible to SELL this program.

They marketed it themselves, in plastic baggies,

for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order.

"This was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant,"

Kapor says proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to God."

Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street,

urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA.

Kapor did seven months there, but never got his MBA.

He picked up some useful tools--mainly a firm grasp

of the principles of accounting--and, in his own words,

"learned to talk MBA." Then he dropped out and went to Silicon Valley.

The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business program,

had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked diligently for them

for six months, got tired of California, and went back to Boston

where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group had made

the critical error of bringing in "professional management."

"That drove them into the ground," Kapor says.

"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.

Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus. . . we BOUGHT it."

"Oh. You BOUGHT it?"

"Yeah."

"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"

Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"

Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself

or his industry. The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s

were COMPUTER GAMES--the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home

in America. Kapor got into business software simply because he didn't have

any particular feeling for computer games. But he was supremely fast

on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts.

And his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal with--

gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of Lotus 1-2-3).

Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street analyst

and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor was the founder and CEO of Lotus,

one of the most spectacularly successful business ventures of the

later twentieth century.

He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he actually

knows how much money he has.

"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."

How much does he actually have, then?

He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I talk about.

Issues of money and class are things that cut pretty close to the bone."

I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might presume, impolitely,

that Kapor has at least forty million--that's what he got the year

he left Lotus. People who ought to know claim Kapor has about

a hundred and fifty million, give or take a market swing

in his stock holdings. If Kapor had stuck with Lotus,

as his colleague friend and rival Bill Gates has stuck

with his own software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor

would likely have much the same fortune Gates has--

somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion,

give or take a few hundred million. Mitch Kapor

has all the money he wants. Money has lost whatever charm

it ever held for him--probably not much in the first place.

When Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far

from the true sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked.

He simply severed all connections with the company and went out the door.

It stunned everyone--except those who knew him best.

Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough

transformation in cyberspace politics. In its first year,

EFF's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars.

Kapor is running EFF out of his pocket change.

Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself

a civil libertarian per se. He has spent quite some time

with true-blue civil libertarians lately, and there's a

political-correctness to them that bugs him. They seem

to him to spend entirely too much time in legal nitpicking

and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in the

everyday real world.

Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he prefers his involvements

direct, personal, and hands-on. "The fact that EFF has a node on the

Internet is a great thing. We're a publisher. We're a distributor

of information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node carries

is back issues of Phrack. They had an internal debate about that in EFF,

and finally decided to take the plunge. They might carry other

digital underground publications--but if they do, he says,

"we'll certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray

wants to put up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has

the whole spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people making up

their own minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the editorials."

Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet

in the service of the public interest. "The problem with being a node

on the Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical specialist.

We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky beast!

We couldn't do it ourselves!"

He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has to evolve

is much more standardized units, that a non-technical person

can feel comfortable with. It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs.

I can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net.

Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have.

It's possible. We're working actively."

Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his material.

"You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone should have a node

on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is,

`IP doesn't scale!'" ("IP" is the interface protocol for the Internet.

As it currently exists, the IP software is simply not capable of

indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will saturate.)

"The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve the protocol! Get the smart people

together and figure out what to do. Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol?

Don't just say, WE CAN'T DO IT."

Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill

at which Kapor clearly excels. I counter that people on the Internet

rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem particularly

anxious to democratize the Net.

Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that this is the snobbery

of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people

who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT! Just because they got here a year,

or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn't give

them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"

I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too,

and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.

Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are entirely

different animals. "The Internet is an open system,

everything is published, everything gets argued about,

basically by anybody who can get in. Mostly, it's exclusive

and elitist just because it's so difficult. Let's make it easier to use."

On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis,

the so-called elitists do have a point as well. "Before people start coming in,

who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize the Net as

`all screwed up'. . . . They should at least take the time to understand

the culture on its own terms. It has its own history--show some respect

for it. I'm a conservative, to that extent."

The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of telecommunications.

The Internet is decentralized, non-hierarchical, almost anarchic.

There are no bosses, no chain of command, no secret data.

If each node obeys the general interface standards,

there's simply no need for any central network authority.

Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an institution? I ask.

That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment. "Their big advantage,

that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring.

But two things are happening. Anyone with right-of-way

is putting down fiber--Southern Pacific Railroad,

people like that--there's enormous `dark fiber' laid in."

("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose enormous capacity

so exceeds the demands of current usage that much of the

fiber still has no light-signals on it--it's still `dark,'

awaiting future use.)

"The other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff

is going to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV

companies to AT&T wants to put in these things called

`personal communication systems.' So you could have local competition--

you could have multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods,

sticking stuff up on poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber.

So what happens to the telephone companies? There's enormous pressure

on them from both sides.

"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a post-industrial,

digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is bad. People will

look back on it and say that in the 19th and 20th centuries

the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise.

You needed one set of wires in the ground. It was too economically

inefficient, otherwise. And that meant one entity running it.

But now, with pieces being wireless--the connections are going

to be via high-level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, ULTIMATELY

there are going to be wires--but the wires are just a commodity.

Fiber, wireless. You no longer NEED a utility."

Water utilities? Gas utilities?

Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when what you're moving

is information, instead of physical substances, then you can play by

a different set of rules. We're evolving those rules now!

Hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system,

and one in which there's more competition in the marketplace.

"The role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats.

The proverbial `level playing field.' A policy that prevents monopolization.

It should result in better service, lower prices, more choices,

and local empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on local empowerment."

Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision which he

and his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great energy.

Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid considering

some of the darker implications of "decentralized, nonhierarchical,

locally empowered" networking.

I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking--faxes,

phones, small-scale photocopiers--played a strong role in dissolving

the power of centralized communism and causing the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from

the Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves,

is rather wishful thinking.

Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode

America's industrial and political infrastructure to the point

where the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable--and the old order

just collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?

"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's extraordinarily unlikely.

In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes

about personal computers--which utterly failed to materialize."

He grins wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I'm VERY opposed to techno-utopias.

Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."

It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to

make the world safe for democracy. He certainly is not

trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians--

least of all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists.

What he really hopes to do is make the world safe for

future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized, small-scale nodes,

with instant global access for the best and brightest,

would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic capitalism

that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.

Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination

of visionary intensity with a strong practical streak.

The Board of the EFF: John Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU,

Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve Wozniak, and Esther Dyson,

the doyenne of East-West computer entrepreneurism--share his gift,

his vision, and his formidable networking talents.

They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence

and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some of the best

and the brightest that the electronic community has to offer.

But can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only dreaming?

They are so few. And there is so much against them.

I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully

with the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh

System 7 software. The next day is Saturday. EFF is closed.

I pay a few visits to points of interest downtown.

One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.

It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white speckled granite. It sits in the

plaza of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, the very place where Kapor was

once fingerprinted by the FBI.

The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original telephone.

"BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875,

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires.

"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret

at what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of

world-wide telephone service."

109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's plaque,

across a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX,

the local Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.

I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly,

hands in my jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New England

autumn day. The central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith

in late Art Deco, eight stories high.

Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck.

The generator strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they

already have their own generators in this eight-story monster?

Then the suspicion strikes me that NYNEX must have heard

of the September 17 AT&T power-outage which crashed New York City.

Belt-and-suspenders, this generator. Very telco.

Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze

bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining

the Bell logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY

--an entity which no longer officially exists.

The doors are locked securely. I peer through the shadowed glass.

Inside is an official poster reading:

"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company

ATTENTION

"All persons while on New England Telephone

Company premises are required to visibly wear their

identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2, Page 1).

"Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are

required to visibly wear a daily pass.

"Thank you.

Kevin C. Stanton.

Building Security Coordinator."

Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal security door,

a locked delivery entrance. Some passing stranger has grafitti-tagged

this door, with a single word in red spray-painted cursive:

Fury

#

My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over now.

I have deliberately saved the best for last.

In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy Roundtable,

in Washington, DC. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,

was a sister organization of EFF, or perhaps its aunt, being older

and perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of politics.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility began in 1981

in Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group of Californian

computer scientists and technicians, united by nothing more

than an electronic mailing list. This typical high-tech

ad-hocracy received the dignity of its own acronym in 1982,

and was formally incorporated in 1983.

CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an educational

outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish

and unthinking trust in complex computer systems.

CPSR insisted that mere computers should never be

considered a magic panacea for humanity's social,

ethical or political problems. CPSR members were especially

troubled about the stability, safety, and dependability

of military computer systems, and very especially troubled

by those systems controlling nuclear arsenals. CPSR was

best-known for its persistent and well-publicized attacks on the

scientific credibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").

In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political activist group,

with over two thousand members in twenty- one local chapters across the US.

It was especially active in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC,

where its Washington office sponsored the Public Policy Roundtable.

The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which had passed CPSR

an extensive grant for operations. This was the first large-scale,

official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil

libertarian community.

Sixty people attended, myself included--in this instance, not so much

as a journalist as a cyberpunk author. Many of the luminaries

of the field took part: Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course.

Richard Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the ACLU.

John Quarterman, author of The Matrix. Steven Levy, author of Hackers.

George Perry and Sandy Weiss of Prodigy Services, there to network

about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial

network was experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo,

manager of the Well. Steve Jackson was there, having finally

found his ideal target audience, and so was Craig Neidorf,

"Knight Lightning" himself, with his attorney, Sheldon Zenner.

Katie Hafner, science journalist, and co-author of Cyberpunk:

Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. Dave Farber,

ARPAnet pioneer and fabled Internet guru. Janlori Goldman

of the ACLU's Project on Privacy and Technology. John Nagle

of Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the House Judiciary Committee.

Tom Guidoboni, the defense attorney in the Internet Worm case.

Lance Hoffman, computer-science professor at The George Washington

University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host of others no less distinguished.

Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address,

expressing his determination to keep ahead of the curve

on the issue of electronic free speech. The address was

well-received, and the sense of excitement was palpable.

Every panel discussion was interesting--some were entirely

compelling. People networked with an almost frantic interest.

I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with

Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a former director

of the National Security Agency. As this was the first known encounter

between an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of

America's largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat,

there was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.

Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In fact

all the discussions at the CPSR were officially off-the-record,

the idea being to do some serious networking in an atmosphere

of complete frankness, rather than to stage a media circus.

In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting and intensely valuable,

was as nothing compared to the truly mind-boggling event that transpired

a mere month later.

#

"Computers, Freedom and Privacy." Four hundred people from

every conceivable corner of America's electronic community.

As a science fiction writer, I have been to some weird gigs in my day,

but this thing is truly BEYOND THE PALE. Even "Cyberthon,"

Point Foundation's "Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area

psychedelia collided headlong with the emergent world

of computerized virtual reality, was like a Kiwanis Club gig

compared to this astonishing do.

The "electronic community" had reached an apogee.

Almost every principal in this book is in attendance.

Civil Libertarians. Computer Cops. The Digital Underground.

Even a few discreet telco people. Colorcoded dots

for lapel tags are distributed. Free Expression issues.

Law Enforcement. Computer Security. Privacy. Journalists.

Lawyers. Educators. Librarians. Programmers.

Stylish punk-black dots for the hackers and phone phreaks.

Almost everyone here seems to wear eight or nine dots,

to have six or seven professional hats.

It is a community. Something like Lebanon perhaps,

but a digital nation. People who had feuded all year

in the national press, people who entertained the deepest

suspicions of one another's motives and ethics, are now

in each others' laps. "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"

had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except

for small irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the

convention's token lunatic, a surprising bonhomie reigned.

CFP was like a wedding-party in which two lovers,

unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot

in a clearly disastrous matrimony.

It is clear to both families--even to neighbors and random guests--

that this is not a workable relationship, and yet the young couple's

desperate attraction can brook no further delay. They simply cannot

help themselves. Crockery will fly, shrieks from their newlywed home

will wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a vulture

over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and there is going

to be a child from it. Tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage.

The Hacker Crackdown is ending in marriage. And there will be a child.

From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry Barlow,

cyberspace ranger, is here. His color photo in

The New York Times Magazine, Barlow scowling

in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat,

dark hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost

and an awesome frontier rifle tucked under one arm,

will be the single most striking visual image

of the Hacker Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest of honor--

along with Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do

they expect these dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?

Barlow delivers the first address. Uncharacteristically,

he is hoarse--the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down.

He speaks briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation,

and takes his leave to a storm of applause.

Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly nervous.

She's been on the Well a lot lately. Reading those Barlow posts.

Following Barlow is a challenge to anyone. In honor of the famous

lyricist for the Grateful Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read--

A POEM. A poem she has composed herself.

It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of Robert W. Service's

The Cremation of Sam McGee, but it is in fact, a poem. It's the Ballad

of the Electronic Frontier! A poem about the Hacker Crackdown and the

sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes. The score or so cops

in the audience, who are sitting together in a nervous claque,

are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is the funniest goddamn thing

they've ever heard. The hackers and civil-libs, who had this woman figured

for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are staring with their jaws hanging loosely.

Never in the wildest reaches of their imagination had they figured

Gail Thackeray was capable of such a totally off-the-wall move.

You can see them punching their mental CONTROL-RESET buttons.

Jesus! This woman's a hacker weirdo! She's JUST LIKE US!

God, this changes everything!

Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the only cop

at the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by

Dorothy Denning. He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable;

a "lion thrown to the Christians."

At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes eloquent

and even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital catalog

of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird hybrid

of George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes an arcane

joke about statistical analysis. At least a third of the crowd laughs aloud.

"They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse observes.

He had been addressing cops--STRAIGHT cops, not computer people.

It had been a worthy meeting, useful one supposes, but nothing like THIS.

There has never been ANYTHING like this. Without any prodding,

without any preparation, people in the audience simply begin to ask questions.

Longhairs, freaky people, mathematicians. Bayse is answering, politely,

frankly, fully, like a man walking on air. The ballroom's atmosphere

crackles with surreality. A female lawyer behind me breaks into a sweat

and a hot waft of surprisingly potent and musky perfume flows off

her pulse-points.

People are giddy with laughter. People are interested,

fascinated, their eyes so wide and dark that they seem eroticized.

Unlikely daisy-chains form in the halls, around the bar, on the escalators:

cops with hackers, civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone phreaks.

Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater with a

tiny Secret Service logo. "I found Phiber Optik at the payphones,

and when he saw my sweater, he turned into a PILLAR OF SALT!" she chortles.

Phiber discusses his case at much length with his arresting officer,

Don Delaney of the New York State Police. After an hour's chat,

the two of them look ready to begin singing "Auld Lang Syne."

Phiber finally finds the courage to get his worst complaint off his chest.

It isn't so much the arrest. It was the CHARGE. Pirating service

off 900 numbers. I'm a PROGRAMMER, Phiber insists. This lame charge

is going to hurt my reputation. It would have been cool to be busted

for something happening, like Section 1030 computer intrusion.

Maybe some kind of crime that's scarcely been invented yet.

Not lousy phone fraud. Phooey.

Delaney seems regretful. He had a mountain of possible criminal charges

against Phiber Optik. The kid's gonna plead guilty anyway. He's a

first timer, they always plead. Coulda charged the kid with most anything,

and gotten the same result in the end. Delaney seems genuinely sorry

not to have gratified Phiber in this harmless fashion. Too late now.

Phiber's pled already. All water under the bridge. Whaddya gonna do?

Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality.

He held a press conference after he busted a bunch of

Masters of Deception kids. Some journo had asked him:

"Would you describe these people as GENIUSES?"

Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "No, I would describe

these people as DEFENDANTS." Delaney busts a kid for

hacking codes with repeated random dialling. Tells the

press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no time flat nowadays,

and a kid has to be STUPID to do something so easy to catch.

Dead on again: hackers don't mind being thought of as Genghis Khan

by the straights, but if there's anything that really gets 'em

where they live, it's being called DUMB.

Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around.

As a second offender he's gonna see prison.

Hackers break the law. They're not geniuses, either.

They're gonna be defendants. And yet, Delaney muses over

a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat

them as common criminals. Delaney knows criminals. These kids,

by comparison, are clueless--there is just no crook vibe off of them,

they don't smell right, they're just not BAD.

Delaney has seen a lot of action. He did Vietnam.

He's been shot at, he has shot people. He's a homicide

cop from New York. He has the appearance of a man who

has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has seen it splattered

across whole city blocks and left to ferment for years.

This guy has been around.

He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story. The dreamy

game strategist has been dealt a bad hand. He has played

it for all he is worth. Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior

is a core of iron. Friends of his say Steve Jackson believes

in the rules, believes in fair play. He will never compromise

his principles, never give up. "Steve," Delaney says to

Steve Jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you.

You're all right!" Jackson, stunned, falls silent and

actually blushes with pleasure.

Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. The kid is

a quick study, you gotta give him that. Dressed by his mom,

the fashion manager for a national clothing chain,

Missouri college techie-frat Craig Neidorf out-dappers

everyone at this gig but the toniest East Coast lawyers.

The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now

law school beckons for Neidorf. He looks like a larval Congressman.

Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf. He's not interested

in computer science. Why should he be? He's not

interested in writing C code the rest of his life,

and besides, he's seen where the chips fall.

To the world of computer science he and Phrack

were just a curiosity. But to the world of law. . . .

The kid has learned where the bodies are buried.

He carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes.

Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek,

for believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and listens to acid rock.

Hell no. Acid's never done ACID! Acid's into ACID HOUSE MUSIC.

Jesus. The very idea of doing LSD. Our PARENTS did LSD, ya clown.

Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full lighthouse

glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt

to WIN THE BOY OVER. The Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is

GIVING CAREER ADVICE TO KNIGHT LIGHTNING! "Your experience

would be very valuable--a real asset," she tells him with

unmistakeable sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated.

He listens with unfeigned attention. He's nodding and saying yes ma'am.

Yes, Craig, you too can forget all about money and enter the glamorous

and horribly underpaid world of PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME!

You can put your former friends in prison--ooops. . . .

You cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely.

You cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings.

Sooner or later you have to come directly to grips.

And yet the very act of assembling here has changed

the entire situation drastically. John Quarterman,

author of The Matrix, explains the Internet at his symposium.

It is the largest news network in the world, it is growing

by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure Internet because

you cannot stop it in place. It cannot stop, because there

is no one anywhere in the world with the authority to stop Internet.

It changes, yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial,

postmodern world and it generates community wherever it

touches, and it is doing this all by itself.

Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik.

Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He does rather.

Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close,

unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks pomaded,

he stays up till four a.m. and misses all the sessions,

then hangs out in payphone booths with his acoustic coupler

gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST

LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least PRETENDING to. . . .

Unlike "Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out

of nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo

cyberpunk fanzine, and then started grilling her on her ethics.

She was squirmin', too. . . . Drake, scarecrow-tall with his

floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and black leather jacket

lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off an unmistakeable air

of the bohemian literatus. Drake is the kind of guy

who reads British industrial design magazines and appreciates

William Gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty.

Drake could never touch a phone or a keyboard again,

and he'd still have the nose-ring and the blurry photocopied

fanzines and the sampled industrial music. He's a radical punk

with a desktop-publishing rig and an Internet address.

Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's

been physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to phreak.

Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them

are about the same height and body-build. Denning's blue eyes

flash behind the round window-frames of her glasses.

"Why did you say I was `quaint?'" she asks Phiber, quaintly.

It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed. . .

"Well, I uh, you know. . . ."

"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the rescue,

the journo gift of gab. . . . She is neat and dapper and yet there's

an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden behind

leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning would look

great inside a china cabinet. . .The Cryptographeress. . .

The Cryptographrix. . .whatever. . . . Weirdly, Peter Denning looks

just like his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys

as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks,

a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie. . . .

This fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent

couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel universe,

where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in Scientific American.

Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these unsavory characters?

Because the time has come for it, that's why.

Because she's the best there is at what she does.

Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime. . . .

With his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands,

the great visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals

like an icebreaker. . . . His eyes are fixed on the future with the

rigidity of a bronze statue. . . . Eventually, he tells his audience,

all business crime will be computer crime, because businesses will do

everything through computers. "Computer crime" as a category will vanish.

In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and evaporate. . . .

Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike, everything is viewed

from some eldritch valley of deep historical abstraction. . . .

Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing flaps in the world

of digital computation. . . . The radio-frequency emanation scandal. . .

KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but nobody else ever has. . . .

The salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical. . . . "Crimoids," he calls them. . . .

Computer viruses are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than

most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at

the moment, the press is visibly hungering for something more outrageous. . . .

The Great Man shares with us a few speculations on the coming crimoids. . . .

Desktop Forgery! Wow. . . . Computers stolen just for the sake of the

information within them--data-napping! Happened in Britain a while ago,

could be the coming thing. . . . Phantom nodes in the Internet!

Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical air. . . .

He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a

very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley. . . .

Aphorisms emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis. . . .

There is no such thing as an adequately secure computer

when one faces a sufficiently powerful adversary. . . .

Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of security. . . .

People are the primary weakness in all information systems. . . .

The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted upward. . . .

Don't ever violate your security by publicly describing

your security measures. . . .

People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet

there is something about the elemental purity of this guy's

philosophy that compels uneasy respect. . . . Parker sounds

like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat, sometimes.

The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep moral principles,

that Harvey there, the one with the broken leg and the checkered past,

is the one who has to be, err. . .that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed

to make the necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed

the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew. . . .

Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a

nasty topic, and we wish we didn't have to have it. . . .

The security expert, armed with method and logic, must think--imagine--

everything that the adversary might do before the adversary might

actually do it. It is as if the criminal's dark brain were an

extensive subprogram within the shining cranium of Donn Parker.

He is a Holmes whose Moriarty does not quite yet exist

and so must be perfectly simulated.

CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding.

It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world

is changing forever tonight, and they're proud to have been there

to see it happen, to talk, to think, to help.

And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself,

as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses

and dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever,

and it takes a while to pinpoint it.

It is the End of the Amateurs.