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A Statement of Principle
by Bruce Sterling
Buffalo PCUG, November 1992
I just wrote my first nonfiction book. It's called The Hacker Crackdown:
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. Writing this book has
required me to spend much of the past year and a half in the company of
hackers, cops, and civil libertarians. I've spent much time listening
to arguments over what's legal, what's illegal, what's right and wrong,
what's decent and what's despicable, what's moral and immoral, in the
world of computers and civil liberties. My various informants were
knowledgeable people who cared passionately about these issues, and
most of them seemed well-intentioned. Considered as a whole, however,
their opinions were a baffling mess of contradictions.
When I started this project, my ignorance of the issues involved was
genuine and profound. I'd never knowingly met anyone from the computer
underground. I'd never logged-on to an underground bulletin board or
read a semi-legal hacker magazine. Although I did care a great deal
about the issue of freedom of expression, I knew sadly little about
the history of civil rights in America or the legal doctrines that
surround freedom of association. My relations with the police were
firmly based on the stratagem of avoiding personal contact with the
police to the greatest extent possible.
I didn't go looking for this project. This project came looking for me.
I became inextricably involved when agents of the United States Secret
Service, acting under the guidance of federal attorneys from Chicago,
came to my home town of Austin on March 1, 1990, and confiscated the
computers of a local science fiction gaming publisher. Steve Jackson
Games, Inc. of Austin, was about to publish a gaming-book called GURPS
Cyberpunk. When the federal law-enforcement agents discovered the
electronic manuscript of Cyberpunk on the computers they had seized
from Mr. Jackson's offices, they expressed grave shock and alarm. They
declared that Cyberpunk was "a manual for computer crime."
It is not my intention to reprise the story of the Jackson case in
this column. I've done that to the best of my ability in The Hacker
Crackdown; and in any case the ramifications of March 1 are far from
over. Mr. Jackson was never charged with any crime. His civil suit
against the raiders is still in federal court as I write this.
I don't want to repeat here what some cops believe, what some hackers
believe, or what some civil libertarians believe. Instead, I want to
discuss my own moral beliefs as a science fiction writer -- such as
they are. As a science fiction writer, I want to attempt a personal
statement of principle. It has not escaped my attention that there are
many people who believe that anyone called a "cyberpunk" must by,
almost by definition, entirely devoid of principle. I offer as
evidence an excerpt from Buck BloomBecker's 1990 book, Spectacular
Computer Crimes. On page 53, in a chapter titled "Who Are The Computer
Criminals?", Mr. BloomBecker introduces the formal classification of
"cyberpunk" criminality:
In the last few years, a new genre of science fiction has arisen under
the evocative name of "cyberpunk." Introduced in the work of William
Gibson, particularly in his prize-winning novel Neuromancer, cyberpunk
takes an apocalyptic view of the technological future. In Neuromancer,
the protagonist is a futuristic hacker who must use the most
sophisticated computer strategies to commit crimes for people who offer
him enough money to buy the biological creations he needs to survive.
His life is one of cynical despair, fueled by the desire to avoid
death. Though none of the virus cases actually seen so far have been
so devastating, this book certainly represents an attitude that should
be watched for when we find new cases of computer viruses and try to
understand the motivations behind them.
The New York Times's John Markoff (Ed. Note: John Markoff is the
husband of our November 25, 1991 General Meeting guest, author Katie
Hafner, and coauthor with here of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on
the Computer Frontier), one of the more perceptive and accomplished
writers in the field, has written that a number of computer criminals
demonstrate new levels of meanness. He characterizes them as cyberpunks.
Those of us who have read Gibson's Neuromancer closely will be aware of
certain factual inaccuracies in Mr. BloomBecker's brief review.
Neuromaner is not "apocalyptic." The chief conspirator in Neuromancer
forces Case's loyalty, not by buying his services, but by planting
poison-sacs in his brain. Case if "fueled" not by greed for money or
"biological creations," or even by the cynical "desire to avoid
death," but by his burning desire to hack cyberspace. And so forth.
However, I don't think this misreading of Neuromancer is based on
carelessness or malice.
The rest of Mr. BloomBecker's book generally is informative,
well-organized, and thoughtful. Instead, I feel that Mr. BloomBecker
manfully absorbed as much of Neuromancer as he could without suffering
a mental toxic reaction. This report of his is what he actually saw
when reading the novel. Neuromancer has won quite a following in the
world of computer crime investigation. A prominent law enforcement
official once told me that police unfailingly conclude the worst when
they find a teenager with a computer and a copy of Neuromancer. When I
declared that I too was a "cyberpunk" writer, she asked me if I would
print the recipe for a pipe-bomb in my works. I was astonished by this
question, which struck me as bizarre rhetorical excess at the time.
That was before I had actually examined bulletin boards in the
computer underground which I found to be chock-a-block with recipes
for pipe-bombs, and worse. (I didn't have the heart to tell her that
my friend and colleague Walter Jon Williams had once written and
published a science fiction story closely describing explosives
derived from simple household chemicals.)
Cyberpunk science fiction (along with science fiction in general) has,
in fact permeated the computer underground. I have met young
underground hackers who use the aliases "Neuromancer," "Wintermute"
and "Count Zero." The Legion of Doom, the absolute bete noir of
law-enforcement, used to congregate on a bulletin board called "Black
Ice." In the past, I didn't know much about anyone in the underground,
but they certainly knew about me. Since that time, I've had people
express sincere admiration for my novels, and then, in almost the same
breath, brag to me about breaking into hospital computers to chortle
over confidential medical reports about herpes victims.
The single most stinging example of this syndrome is "Pengo," a member
of a German hacker-group that broke into Internet computers while in
the pay of the KGB. He told German police, and the judge at the trial
of his co-conspirators, that he was inspired by Neuromancer and John
Brunner's Shockwave Rider. I didn't write Neuromancer. I did, however,
read it in manuscript form and offered many purportedly helpful
comments. I praised the book publicly and repeatedly and at length.
I've done everything I can to get people to read this book.
I don't recall cautioning Gibson that his novel might lead to anarchist
hackers selling their expertise to the ferocious and repulsive apparat
that gave the world the Lubyanka and Gulag Archipelago. I don't think I
could have issued any such caution, even if I'd felt the danger of such
a possibility, which I didn't. I still don't' know in what fashion
Gibson might have changed his book to avoid inciting evildoers, while
still retaining the integrity of his vision -- they very quality about
the book that makes it compelling and worthwhile.
This leads me to my first statements of moral principle.
As a "cyberpunk" science fiction writer, I am not responsible for every
act committed by a Bohemian with a computer. I don't own the word
"cyberpunk" and cannot help where it is bestowed, or who uses it, or to
what ends.
As a science fiction writer, it is not by business to make people
behave. It is my business to make people imagine. I cannot control
other people's imaginations -- any more than I would allow them to
control mine. I am, however, morally obliged to speak out when acts of
evil are committed that use my ideas or my rhetoric, however, distantly,
as a justification.
Pengo and his friends committed a grave crime that was worthy of
condemnation and punishment. They were clever, but treacherously
clever. They were imaginative, but it was imagination in a bad cause.
They were technically accomplished, but they abused their expertise
for illicit profit and to feed their egos. They may be "cyberpunks" --
according to many, they may deserve that title far more than I do --
but they're no friends of mine.
What is "crime"? What is a moral offence? What actions are evil and
dishonorable? I find these extraordinarily difficult questions. I have
no special status that should allow me to speak with authority on such
subjects. Quite the contrary. As a writer in a scorned popular
literature and a self-professed eccentric Bohemian, I have next to no
authority of any kind. I'm not a moralist, philosopher, or prophet.
I've always considered my "moral role," such as it is, to be that of
court jester -- a person sometimes allowed to speak the unspeakable,
to explore ideas and issues in a format where they can be treated as
games, thought-experiments, or metaphors, not as prescriptions, laws,
or sermons.
I have no religion, no sacred scripture to guide my actions and
provide an infallible moral bedrock. I'm not seeking political
responsibilities or the power of public office. I habitually question
any pronouncement of authority, and entertain the liveliest skepticism
about the processes of law and justice. I feel no urge to conform to
the behavior of the majority of my fellow citizens. I'm a pain in the
neck.
My behavior is far from flawless. I lived and thrived in Austin, Texas
in the 1970s and 1980s, in a festering milieu of arty
crypto-intellectual hippies. I've committed countless "crimes," like
millions of other people in my generation. These crimes were of the
glamorous "victimless" variety, but they would surely have served to
put me in prison had I done them, say, in front of the State
Legislature.
Had I lived a hundred years ago as I live today, I would probably have
been lynched by outraged fellow Texans as a moral abomination. If I
lived in Iran today and wrote and thought as I do, I would probably be
tried and executed.
As far as I can tell, moral relativism is a fact of life. I think it
might be possible to outwardly conform to every jot and title of the
taboos of one's society, while feeling no emotional or intellectual
commitment to them. I understand that certain philosophers have argued
that this is morally proper behavior for a good citizen. But I can't
live that life. I feel, sincerely, that my society is engaged in many
actions which are foolish and shortsighted and likely to lead to our
destruction. I feel that our society must change, and change radically,
in a process that will cause great damage to our present system of
values. This doesn't excuse my own failings, which I regret, but it
does explain, I hope, why my lifestyle and my actions are not likely
to make authority feel entirely comfortable.
Knowledge is power. The rise of computer networking, of the Information
Society, is doing strange and disruptive things to the processes by
which power and knowledge are currently distributed. Knowledge and
information, supplied through these new conduits, are highly corrosive
to the status quo. People living in the midst of technological
revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily because they
mean to break the laws, but because the laws are vague, obsolete,
overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable. Hackers break laws as a matter
of course, and some have been punished unduly for relatively minor
infractions not motivated by malice. Even computer police, seeking
earnestly to apprehend and punish wrongdoers, have been accused of
abuse of their offices, and of violation of the Constitution and the
civil statutes. These police may indeed have committed these "crimes."
Some officials have already suffered grave damage to their reputations
and careers -- all the time convinced that they were morally in the
right; and, like the hackers they pursued, never feeling any genuine
sense of shame, remorse, or guilt.
I have lived, and still live, in a counterculture, with its own system
of values. Counterculture -- Bohemia -- is never far from criminality.
"To live outside the law you must be honest," was Bob Dylan's classic
hippie motto. A Bohemian finds romance in the notion that "his clothes
are dirty but his hands are clean." But there is a danger in setting
aside the strictures of the law to linchpin one's honor on one's
personal integrity. If you throw away the rulebook to rely on your
individual conscience you will be put in the way of temptation.
And temptation is a burden. It hurts. It is grotesquely easy to
justify, to rationalize, an action of which one should be ashamed. In
investigating the milieu of computer-crime I have come into contact
with a world of temptation formerly closed to me. Nowadays, it would
take no great effort on my part to break into computers, steal
long-distance telephone service, to ingratiate myself with people who
would merrily supply me with huge amounts of illicitly copied software.
I could even build pipe-bombs. I haven't done these things, and
disapprove of them; in fact, having come to know these practices better
than I cared to, I feel sincere revulsion for them now. But this
knowledge is a kind of power, and power is tempting. Journalistic
objectivity, or the urge to play with ideas, cannot entirely protect
you. Temptation clings to the mind like a series of small but nagging
weights. Carrying these weights may make you stronger. Or they may drag
you down.
"His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean." It's a fine ideal,
when you can live up to it. Like a lot of Bohemians, I've gazed with a
find disdain on certain people in power whose clothes were clean but
their hands conspicuously dirty. But I've also met a few people eager
to pat me on the back, whose clothes were dirty and their hands as well.
They're not pleasant company.
Somehow one must draw a line. I'm not very good at drawing lines. When
other people have drawn me a line, I've generally been quite anxious
to have a good long contemplative look at the other side. I don't feel
much confidence in my ability to draw these lines. But I feel that I
should. The world won't wait. It only took a few guys with pool cues
and switchblades to turn Woodstock Nation into Altamont. Haight-Ashbury
was once full of people who could trust anyone they'd dropped acid
with -- for about six months. Soon the place was aswarm with
speed-freaks and junkies, and heaven help us if they didn't look just
like the love-bead dudes from the League of Spiritual Discovery.
Corruption exists, temptation exists. Some people fall. And the
temptation is there for all of us, all the time.
I've come to draw the line at money. It's not a good line, but it's
something. There are certain activities that are unorthodox, dubious,
illegal, or quasi-legal, but they might perhaps be justified by an
honest person with unconventional standards. But in my opinion, when
you're making a commercial living from breaking the law, you're beyond
the pale. I find it hard to accept your counterculture sincerity when
you're grinning and pocketing the cash, compadre.
I can understand a kid swiping phone service when he's broke, powerless,
and dying to explore the new world of the networks. I don't approve of
this, but I can understand it. I scorn to do this myself, and I never
have; but I don't find it so heinous that it deserves pitiless
repression. But if you're stealing phone service and selling it -- if
you've made yourself a miniature phone company and you're pimping off
the energy of others just to line your own pockets -- you're a thief.
When the heat comes to put you away, don't come crying "brother" to me.
If you're creating software and giving it away, you're a fine human
being. If you're writing software and letting other people copy it and
try it out as shareware, I appreciate your sense of trust, and if I
like your work, I'll pay you. If you're copying other people's software
and giving it away, you're damaging other people's interests, and
should be ashamed. even if you're posing as a glamorous info-liberating
subversive. But if you're copying other people's software and selling
it, you're a crook and I despise you.
Writing and spreading viruses is a vile, hurtful, and shameful activity
that I unreservedly condemn. There's something wrong with the
Information Society. There's something wrong with the idea that
"information" is a commodity like a desk or a chair. There's something
wrong with patenting software algorithms. There's something direly
mean-spirited and ungenerous about inventing a language and then
renting it out to other people to speak. There's something
unprecedented and sinister in the process of creeping commodification
of data and knowledge. A computer is something too close the human
brain for me to rest entirely content with someone patenting or
copyrighting the process of its thought. There's something sick and
unworkable about an economic system which has already spewed forth
such a vast black market. I don't think democracy will thrive in a
milieu where vast empires of data are encrypted, restricted,
proprietary, confidential, top secret, and sensitive. I fear for the
stability of a society that builds sand castles out of databits and
tries to stop a real-world tide with royal commands.
Whole societies can fall. In Eastern Europe we have seen whole nations
collapse in a slough of corruption. In pursuit of their unworkable
economic doctrine, the Marxist doubled and redoubled their efforts at
social control, while losing all sight of the values that make life
worth living. At last the entire power structure was so discredited
that the last remaining shred of moral integrity could only be found
in Bohemia: in dissidents and dramatists and their illegal samizdat
underground fanzines. Their clothes were dirty but their hands were
clean. The only agitprop poster Vaclav Havel needed was a sign saying
"Vaclav Havel Guarantees Free Elections." He'd never held power, but
people believed him, and they believed his Velvet Revolution friends.
I wish there were people in the Computer Revolution who could inspire,
and deserved to inspire, that level of trust. I wish there were people
in the Electronic Frontier whose moral integrity unquestionably
matched the unleashed power of those digital machines. A society is in
dire straits when it puts its Bohemia in power. I tremble for my
country when I contemplate this prospect. And yet it's possible. If
dire straits come, it can even be the last best hope.
The issues that enmeshed my in 1990 are not going to go away. I became
involved as a writer and journalist, because I felt it was right.
Having made that decision, I intend to stand by my commitment. I expect
to stay involved in these issues, in this debate, for the rest of my
life. These are timeless issues: civil rights, knowledge, power,
freedom and privacy, the necessary steps that a civilized society must
take to protect itself from criminals. There is no finality in politics;
it creates itself anew, it must be dealt with every day.
The future is a dark road and our speed is headlong. I didn't ask for
power or responsibility. I'm a science fiction writer, I only wanted
to play with Big Ideas in my cheerfully lunatic sandbox. What little
benefit I myself can contribute to society would likely be best
employed in writing better science fiction novels. I intend to write
those better novels, if I can. But in the meantime I seem to have
accumulated a few odd shreds of influence. It's a very minor kind of
power, and doubtless more than I deserve; but power without
responsibility is a monstrous thing.
In writing Hacker Crackdown, I tried to describe the truth as other
people saw it. I see it too, with my own eyes, but I can't yet to
pretend to understand what I'm seeing. The best I can do, it seems to
me, is to try to approach the situation as an open-minded person of
goodwill. I therefore offer the following final set of principles,
which I hope will guide me in the days to come.
I'll listen to anybody, and I'll try to imagine myself in their
situation. I'll assume goodwill on the part of others until they
fully earn my distrust. I won't cherish grudges. I'll forgive those
who change their minds and actions, just as I reserve the right to
change my own mind and actions. I'll look hard for the disadvantages
to others, in the things that give me advantage. I won't assume that
the way I live today is the natural order of the universe, just
because I happen to be benefiting from it at the moment. And while
I don't plan to give up making money from my ethically dubious
cyberpunk activities, I hope to temper my impropriety by giving more
work away for no money at all.