THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS (part-4)

The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have followed it thus far, has
been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal. The story of the
Civil Libertarians, though it partakes of all those other aspects, is profoundly
and thoroughly *political.*
In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the ownership and
nature of cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public. People
from some of the oddest corners of American society suddenly found
themselves public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled, and
tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy subcultural
niches. This was generally to prove a mistake.
But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found themselves
organizing, propagandizing, podium- pounding, persuading, touring,
negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to interviews,
squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly
sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.
It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this competitive
advantage.
The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite. They find
it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their actions in front
of the general public. Actually, hackers roundly despise the "ignorant"
public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the system." Hackers
do propagandize, but only among themselves, mostly in giddy, badly
spelled manifestos of class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie
utopianism. Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and preserve
their underground reputations. But if they speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile surface-tension of the underground,
and they will be harrassed or arrested. Over the longer term,
most hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give up. As a
political force, the digital underground is hamstrung.
The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted seige.
They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated public
image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one another
with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have suffered
at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't trust the public's
judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded. Should the
general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand its own best
interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave threat to
the specialized technical power and authority that the telcos have relished
for over a century. The telcos do have strong advantages: loyal
employees, specialized expertise, influence in the halls of power, tactical
allies in law enforcement, and unbelievably vast amounts of money.
But politically speaking, they lack genuine grassroots support; they
simply don't seem to have many friends.
Cops know a lot of things other people don't know. But cops willingly
reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they feel will meet
their institutional purposes and further public order. Cops have
respect, they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets and
even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly well in limelight.
When pressed, they will step out in the public gaze to threaten badguys,
or to cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the
naive and misguided. But then they go back within their time-honored
fortress of the station-house, the courtroom and the rule-book.
The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born
political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern
truism that communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public agenda — and
*keep it there* — is power. Fame is power. Simple personal fluency
and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the public's eye
and ear. The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power" — though
they all owned computers, most were not particularly advanced computer
experts. They had a good deal of money, but nowhere near the earthshaking
wealth and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or federal
agencies. They had no ability to arrest people. They carried out no
phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.
But they really knew how to network.
Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have operated
very much in the open, more or less right in the public hurly-burly.
They have lectured audiences galore and talked to countless journalists,
and have learned to refine their spiels. They've kept the cameras
clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped that email, run those photocopiers
on overtime, licked envelopes and spent small fortunes on
airfare and long- distance. In an information society, this open, overt,
obvious activity has proven to be a profound advantage.
In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled out of nowhere
in particular, at warp speed. This "group" (actually, a networking gaggle
of interested parties which scarcely deserves even that loose term)
has almost nothing in the way of formal organization. Those formal
civil libertarian organizations which did take an interest in cyberspace
issues, mainly the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and
the American Civil Liberties Union, were carried along by events in
1990, and acted mostly as adjuncts, underwriters or launching- pads.
The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success of any
of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990. At this writing, their future
looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their hands. This
should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives and
lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.
_____
In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino, California, had a
problem. Someone had illicitly copied a small piece of Apple's proprietary
software, software which controlled an internal chip driving the
Macintosh screen display. This Color QuickDraw source code was a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property. Only trusted
Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.
But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise. This person
(or persons) made several illicit copies of this source code, perhaps as
many as two dozen. He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy
disks into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America: people
in the computer industry who were associated with, but not directly
employed by, Apple Computer.
The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological, and very
hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it will be recalled, stole the fire of the
Gods and gave this potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden
mankind. A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the
corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu" Prometheus had himself
cast in the role of rebel demigod. The illicitly copied data was given
away for free.
The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the fate of the ancient
Greek Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for centuries by the
vengeful gods while an eagle tore and ate his liver. On the other hand,
NuPrometheus chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role
model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched and
replicated was more or less useless to Apple's industrial rivals (or, in
fact, to anyone else). Instead of giving fire to mankind, it was more as
if NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic
lighter. The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. It was
best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the face for the Apple
corporate heirarchy.
Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. Apple's
founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both taken their leave long since.
Their raucous core of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew of
1960s Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with the
new button-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple. Many of the programmers
and developers who had invented the Macintosh model in the
early 1980s had also taken their leave of the company. It was they, not
the current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The NuPrometheus stunt was well-calculated
to wound company morale.
Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in high-profile
intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft of trade
secrets. These were likely the right people to call, and rumor has it
that the entities responsible were in fact discovered by the FBI, and then
quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus was never publicly
charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed. But there were no
further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software. Eventually the
painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.
In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found
themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI.
One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most unusual
man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is perhaps best
known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics for
"Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues," "I Need a
Miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the band since 1970.
Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist should be
interviewed by the FBI in a computer- crime case, it might be well to
say a word or two about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead are perhaps
the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural
emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, in the
glory days of Movement politics and lysergic transcendance. The
Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique decals,
psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing
and open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the realities, of
Californian freak power surround the Grateful Dead like knotted
macrame.
The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees are radical
Bohemians. This much is widely understood. Exactly what this implies
in the 1990s is rather more problematic.
The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy entertainers: number 20, according to *Forbes* magazine, right
between M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad
group of purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars.
They have been earning sums much along this line for quite some time
now.
And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit tax
specialists — they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians — this money
has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess. The Dead have
been quietly active for many years, funding various worthy activities in
their extensive and widespread cultural community.
The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American power
establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force to be reckoned
with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many places,
both likely and unlikely.
The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist
rhetoric, but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On
the contrary, like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent
their entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic equipment.
They have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy that might
happen to catch their fancy. And their fancy is quite extensive.
The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,
lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all
descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's cofounder,
used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.
These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number of
people all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian
and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a
set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but
they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running
MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days,
even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-
graphics demos in his lecture tours. John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He is, however,
a ranking Deadhead.
Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like
"social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. But Barlow
might be better described as a "poet" — if one keeps in mind Percy
Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of
the world."
Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. In 1987, he
narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the Wyoming
State Senate. Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of
a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early forties, married
and the father of three daughters.
Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of consistency.
In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle rancher
sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications devotee.
The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He genuinely
enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from smalltown
Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and lively
crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over the
world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing attractive: its fastlane
pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its open- endedness. Barlow began
dabbling in computer journalism, with marked success, as he was a
quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to
San Francisco to network with Deadhead friends. There Barlow made
extensive contacts throughout the Californian computer community,
including friendships among the wilder spirits at Apple.
In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of the
FBI. The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.
Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area of his
interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to struggle to
explain the very nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local
FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling. Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to the puzzled fed, was
alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under FBI suspicion as an evil
influence in the electronic community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker
called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a suspect group called
the Hackers Conference.
The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a yearly
Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts. The hackers of
the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do with the hackers of
the digital underground. On the contrary, the hackers of this conference
were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech CEOs, consultants,
journalists and entrepreneurs. (This group of hackers were the exact
sort of "hackers" most likely to react with militant fury at any criminal
degradation of the term "hacker.")
Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though his
computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled by this
anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.
Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the Point
Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy Californian
60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major launch-pad of the
civil libertarian effort.
Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area
Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous.
Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the *Whole
Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during
the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of practical
(and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism,
and getting back-to-the-land. The *Whole Earth Catalog,* and its
sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a National Book Award.
With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the *Whole Earth
Catalog* had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but
in its magazine incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point
Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and
ideas." *CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was never a widely
popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor,
*CoEvolution Quarterly* failed to revolutionize Western civilization
and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian
paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked
a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness.
*CoEvolution Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came
out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. It was
poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of
mouth.
It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers. And yet — it
never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in, year out, decade in,
decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the
magazine. The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the
way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to understand
what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the letter-columns
could be described as "togetherness").
But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by. Then, in
1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, *CoEvolution
Quarterly* suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered the
computer revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog* of
1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie- dyed faithful, and
rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present company
included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference,
and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities
of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution Quarterly* folded its teepee,
replaced by *Whole Earth Software Review* and eventually by *Whole
Earth Review* (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under
the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold).
1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" — the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link."
The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.
As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and
remained one. It was local to San Francisco. It was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. Its complex UNIX-based
software might be most charitably described as "user- opaque." It was
run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit cultural
foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed with fans of the Grateful
Dead.
Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area
counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.
Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as
"Wellbeings") were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They
tended to work in the information industry: hardware, software,
telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and
journalists were especially common on the Well, attracted by Point
Foundation's open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."
There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint about
access codes or credit-card theft. No one used handles. Vicious "flamewars"
were held to a comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were
sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disconnected
his phone, trashed his house, or posted his credit card numbers.
The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum
for access and storage, and lost money for years — but not enough to
hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990,
the Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a
gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference
itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens,
sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate
that could last for months or years on end.