Inside, someone"s bike has been chained to the handrails of a modest flight of stairs. A wall of modish gla.s.s 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 Cybers.p.a.ce," 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 Mitch.e.l.l Kapor founded in the late 70s. The software program Kapor co- auth.o.r.ed, "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 p.r.o.nounced 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, h.e.l.l-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," Sat.u.r.days 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 s.e.x 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 G.o.d."
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 a.n.a.lyst 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 cla.s.s 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 cybers.p.a.ce 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 sn.o.bbery 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 cybers.p.a.ce! 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 inst.i.tution? 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 compet.i.tion--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 ent.i.ty 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 compet.i.tion in the marketplace.
"The role of government will be to make sure that n.o.body 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 Sat.u.r.day. 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 gla.s.s 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 ent.i.ty which no longer officially exists.
The doors are locked securely. I peer through the shadowed gla.s.s. 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 pa.s.s.
"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 pa.s.sing 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 a.r.s.enals. 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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.dwin 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 Cybers.p.a.ce" 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 princ.i.p.al 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, cybers.p.a.ce 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 hoa.r.s.e--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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 b.u.t.tons. Jesus! This woman"s a hacker weirdo! She"s JUST LIKE US! G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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.