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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.