The Hacker's Encyclopedia 1998/hackers_encyclopedia.iso/zines/eff/effcp.txt

Text File | 2003-06-11 | 32.0 KB | 675 lines

CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT
by

John Perry Barlow
[e-mail]

Desperados of the DataSphere

So me and my sidekick Howard,  we was sitting out in front of the 40 Rod
Saloon one evening  when he all of a sudden says, "Lookee  here.  What do
you reckon?"  I look up and there's these two strangers riding into town.
They're young and got kind of a restless, bored way about 'em.  A person
don't  need both eyes to see they mean trouble...

Well, that wasn't quite how it went.  Actually, Howard and I were
floating blind as cave fish in the electronic barrens of the WELL, so
the whole incident passed as words on a display screen:

Howard:    Interesting couple of newusers just signed on.  One calls himself
    acid and the other's optik.

Barlow:    Hmmm.  What are their real names?

Howard:    Check their finger files.

And so I typed !finger acid.  Several seconds later the WELL's
Sequent computer sent the following message to my Macintosh in
Wyoming:

    Login name: acid            In real life: Acid Phreak

By this, I knew that the WELL had a new resident and that his
corporeal analog was supposedly called Acid Phreak.  Typing !finger
optik yielded results of similar insufficiency, including the claim that
someone, somewhere in the real world, was walking around calling
himself Phiber Optik.  I doubted it.

However, associating these sparse data with the knowledge that the
WELL was about to host a conference on computers and security
rendered the conclusion that I had made my first sighting of genuine
computer crackers.  As the arrival of an outlaw was a major event to
the settlements of the Old West, so was the appearance of crackers
cause for stir on the WELL.

The WELL (or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is an example of the
latest thing in frontier villages, the computer bulletin board.  In this
kind of small town, Main Street is a central minicomputer to which
(in the case of the WELL) as many as 64 microcomputers may be
connected at one time by phone lines and little blinking boxes called
modems.

In this silent world, all conversation is typed.  To enter it, one
forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone.
You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but
not what either they or their physical surroundings look like.  Town
meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything from
sexual kinks to depreciation schedules.

There are thousands of these nodes in the United States, ranging from
PC clone hamlets of a few users to mainframe metros like
CompuServe, with its 550,000 subscribers.  They are used by
corporations to transmit memoranda and spreadsheets, universities
to disseminate research, and a multitude of factions, from apiarists to
Zoroastrians, for purposes unique to each.

Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all connected
to one another.  Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the
Net.  It extends across that immense region of electron states,
microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi
writer William Gibson named Cyberspace.

Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the
19th Century West.  It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally
ambiguous, verbally terse (unless you happen to be a court
stenographer), hard to get around in, and up for grabs.  Large
institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual
natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to the point of
sociopathy.  It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both
outlaws and new ideas about liberty.

Recognizing this, Harper's Magazine decided in December, 1989 to
hold one of its periodic Forums on the complex of issues surrounding
computers, information, privacy, and electronic intrusion or
"cracking."  Appropriately, they convened their conference in
Cyberspace, using the WELL as the "site."

Harper's invited an odd lot of about 40 participants.  These included:
Clifford Stoll, whose book The Cuckoo's Egg details his cunning efforts
to nab a German cracker.  John Draper or "Cap'n Crunch," the grand-
daddy of crackers whose blue boxes got Wozniak and Jobs into
consumer electronics.  Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly of Whole Earth
fame.  Steven Levy, who wrote the seminal Hackers.  A retired Army
colonel named Dave Hughes.  Lee Felsenstein, who designed the
Osborne computer and was once called the "Robespierre of
computing."  A UNIX wizard and former hacker named Jeff
Poskanzer.  There was also a score of aging techno-hippies, the
crackers, and me.

What I was doing there was not precisely clear since I've spent most
of my working years either pushing cows or song-mongering, but I at
least brought to the situation a vivid knowledge of actual cow-towns,
having lived in or around one most of my life.

That and a kind of innocence about both the technology and morality
of Cyberspace which was soon to pass into the confusion of
knowledge.

At first, I was inclined toward sympathy with Acid 'n' Optik as well
as their colleagues, Adelaide, Knight Lightning, Taran King, and
Emmanuel.  I've always been more comfortable with outlaws than
Republicans, despite having more certain credentials in the latter
camp.

But as the Harper's Forum mushroomed into a boom-town of ASCII
text (the participants typing 110,000 words in 10 days), I began to
wonder.  These kids were fractious, vulgar, immature, amoral,
insulting, and too damned good at their work.

Worse, they inducted a number of former kids like myself into
Middle Age.  The long feared day had finally come when some
gunsel would yank my beard and call me, too accurately, an old fart.

Under ideal circumstances, the blind gropings of bulletin board
discourse force a kind of Noh drama stylization on human commerce.
Intemperate responses, or "flames" as they are called, are common
even among conference participants who understand one another,
which, it became immediately clear, the cyberpunks and techno-
hippies did not.

My own initial enthusiasm for the crackers wilted under a steady
barrage of typed testosterone.  I quickly remembered I didn't know
much about who they were, what they did, or how they did it.  I also
remembered stories about crackers working in league with the Mob,
ripping off credit card numbers and getting paid for them in (stolen)
computer equipment.

And I remembered Kevin Mitnik.  Mitnik, now 25, recently served
federal time for a variety of computer and telephone related crimes.
Prior to incarceration, Mitnik was, by all accounts, a dangerous guy
with a computer.  He disrupted phone company operations and
arbitrarily disconnected the phones of celebrities.  Like the kid in
Wargames, he broke into the North American Defense Command
computer in Colorado Springs.

Unlike the kid in Wargames, he is reputed to have made a practice of
destroying and altering data. There is even the (perhaps apocryphal)
story that he altered the credit information of his probation officer
and other enemies.  Digital Equipment claimed that his depredations
cost them more than $4 million in computer downtime and file
rebuilding.  Eventually, he was turned in by a friend who, after
careful observation, had decided he was "a menace to society."

His spectre began to hang over the conference.  After several days of
strained diplomacy, the discussion settled into a moral debate on the
ethics of security and went critical.

The techno-hippies were of the unanimous opinion that, in Dylan's
words, one "must be honest to live outside the law."   But these
young strangers apparently lived by no code save those with which
they unlocked forbidden regions of the Net.

They appeared to think that improperly secured systems deserved to
be violated and, by extension, that unlocked houses ought to be
robbed.  This latter built particular heat in me since I refuse, on
philosophical grounds, to lock my house.

Civility broke down.  We began to see exchanges like:

Dave Hughes:    Clifford Stoll said a wise thing that no one has
        commented on. That networks are
        built on trust. If they aren't, they should be.


Acid Phreak:    Yeah. Sure.  And we should use the 'honor system' as a
        first line of security against hack attempts.


Jef Poskanzer:    This guy down the street from me sometimes leaves his
        back door unlocked. I told him about it once, but he still
        does it.  If I had the chance to do it over, I would go in the
        back door, shoot him, and take all his money and
        consumer electronics.  It's the only way to get through to
        him.

Acid Phreak:    Jef Poskanker (Puss?  Canker?  yechh)  Anyway, now
        when did you first start having these delusions where
        computer hacking was even *remotely* similar to
        murder?

Presented with such a terrifying amalgam of raw youth and apparent
power, we fluttered like a flock of indignant Babbitts around the
Status Quo, defending it heartily.  One former hacker howled to the
Harper's editor in charge of the forum, "Do you or do you not have
names and addresses for these criminals?"  Though they had
committed no obvious crimes, he was ready to call the police.

They finally got to me with:

Acid:         Whoever said they'd leave the door open to their house...
        where do you live?  (the address)  Leave it to me in mail if you
        like.

I had never encountered anyone so apparently unworthy of my trust
as these little nihilists.  They had me questioning a basic tenet,
namely that the greatest security lies in vulnerability.  I decided it
was time to put that principal to the test...

Barlow:        Acid. My house is at 372 North Franklin Street in
        Pinedale, Wyoming. If you're heading north on Franklin,
        you go about two blocks off the main drag before you run
        into hay meadow on the left. I've got the last house before
        the field. The computer is always on...

        And is that really what you mean? Are you merely just
        the kind of little sneak that goes around looking for easy
        places to violate? You disappoint me, pal. For all your
        James Dean-On-Silicon rhetoric, you're not a cyberpunk.
        You're just a punk.

Acid Phreak:    Mr. Barlow:  Thank you for posting all I need to get your
        credit information and a whole lot more!  Now, who is to
        blame?  ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!
        I think this should just about sum things up.


Barlow:        Acid, if you've got a lesson to teach me, I hope it's not that
        it's idiotic to trust one's fellow man. Life on those terms
        would be endless and brutal. I'd try to tell you something
        about conscience, but I'd sound like Father O'Flannigan
        trying to reform the punk that's about to gutshoot him.
        For no more reason that to watch him die.

        But actually, if you take it upon yourself to destroy my
        credit, you might do me a favor. I've been looking for
        something to put the brakes on my burgeoning
        materialism.

I spent a day wondering whether I was dealing with another Kevin
Mitnik before the other shoe dropped:

Barlow:        ... With crackers like acid and optik, the issue is less
        intelligence than alienation.  Trade their modems for
        skateboards and only a slight conceptual shift would
        occur.

Optik:         You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with
        that of a skateboarder.  Hmmm...  This was indeed boring,
        but nonetheless:

At which point he downloaded my credit history.

Optik had hacked the core of TRW, an institution which has made
my business (and yours) their business, extracting from it an
abbreviated ( and incorrect) version of my personal financial life.
With this came the implication that he and Acid could and would
revise it to my disadvantage if I didn't back off.

I have since learned that while getting someone's TRW file is fairly
trivial, changing it is not.  But at that time, my assessment of the
crackers'  black skills was one of superstitious awe.  They were digital
brujos  about to zombify my economic soul.

To a middle-class American, one's credit rating has become nearly
identical to his freedom.  It now appeared that I was dealing with
someone who had both the means and desire to hoodoo mine,
leaving me trapped in a life of wrinkled bills and money order
queues.  Never again would I call the Sharper Image on a whim.

I've been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police
custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one has
ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment.  I
realized that we had problems which exceeded the human
conductivity of the WELL's bandwidth.  If someone were about to
paralyze me with a spell, I wanted a more visceral sense of him than
could fit through a modem.

I e-mailed him asking him to give me a phone call.  I told him I
wouldn't insult his skills by giving him my phone number and, with
the assurance conveyed by that challenge, I settled back and waited
for the phone to ring.  Which, directly, it did.

In this conversation and the others that followed I encountered an
intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who
sounded, and continues to sound, as though there's little harm in him
to man or data.  His cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory,
and I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as
desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.

The terrifying poses which Optik and Acid had been striking on
screen were a media-amplified example of a human adaptation I'd
seen before: One becomes as he is beheld.  They were simply living up to
what they thought we, and, more particularly, the editors of
Harper's, expected of them.  Like the televised tears of disaster
victims, their snarls adapted easily to mass distribution.

Months later, Harper's took Optik, Acid and me to dinner at a
Manhattan restaurant which, though very fancy, was appropriately
Chinese.  Acid and Optik, as material beings, were well-scrubbed and
fashionably-clad. They looked to be dangerous as ducks.  But, as
Harper's and the rest of the media have discovered to their delight,
the boys had developed distinctly showier personae for their rambles
through the howling wilderness of Cyberspace.

Glittering with spikes of binary chrome, they strode past the kleig
lights and into the digital distance.  There they would be outlaws.  It
was only a matter of time before they started to believe themselves as
bad as they sounded.  And no time at all before everyone else did.

In this, they were like another kid named Billy, many of whose feral
deeds in the pre-civilized West were encouraged by the same dime
novelist who chronicled them.  And like Tom Horn, they seemed to
have some doubt as to which side of the law they were on.  Acid even
expressed an ambition to work for the government someday, nabbing
"terrorists and code abusers."

There is also a frontier ambiguity to the "crimes" the crackers
commit.  They are not exactly stealing VCR's.  Copying a text file
from TRW doesn't deprive its owner of anything except
informational exclusivity.  (Though it may said that information has
monetary value only in proportion to its containment.)

There was no question that they were making unauthorized use of
data channels.  The night I met them, they left our restaurant table
and disappeared into the phone booth for a long time.  I didn't see
them marshalling quarters before they went.

And, as I became less their adversary and more their scoutmaster, I
began to get "conference calls" in which six or eight of them would
crack pay phones all over New York and simultaneously land on my
line in Wyoming.  These deft maneuvers made me think of sky-
diving stunts where large groups convene geometrically in free fall.
In this case, the risk was largely legal.

Their other favorite risky business is the time-honored adolescent
sport of trespassing.  They insist on going where they don't belong.
But then teen-age boys have been proceeding uninvited since the
dawn of human puberty.  It seems hard-wired.  The only innovation
is in the new form of the forbidden zone the means of getting in it.

In fact, like Kevin Mitnik, I broke into NORAD when I was 17.  A
friend and I left a nearby "woodsie" (as rustic adolescent drunks
were calce
will no longer take his calls.  He figures that, in the months since the
raid, his little company has lost an estimated $125,000.  With such a
fiscal hemorrhage, he can't afford a lawyer to take after the Secret
Service.  Both the state and national offices of the ACLU told him to
"run along" when he solicited their help.

He tried to go to the press.  As in most other cases, they were
unwilling to raise the alarm.  Jackson theorized, "The conservative
press is taking the attitude that the suppression of evil hackers is a
good thing and that anyone who happens to be put out of business in
the meantime...well, that's just their tough luck."

In fact, Newsweek did run a story about the event, portraying it from
Jackson's perspective, but they were almost alone in dealing with it.

What had he done to deserve this nightmare?  Role-playing games, of
which Dungeons and Dragons is the most famous, have been accused
of creating obsessive involvement in their nerdy young players, but
no one before had found it necessary to prevent their publication.

It seems that Steve Jackson had hired the wrong writer.  The
managing editor of Steve Jackson Games is a former cracker,  known
by his fellows in the Legion of Doom as The Mentor.  At the time of
the raid, he and the rest of Jackson staff had been working for over a
year on a game called GURPS Cyberpunk, High-Tech Low-Life Role-
Playing.

At the time of the Secret Service raids, the game resided entirely on
the hard disks they confiscated.  Indeed, it was their target.  They told
Jackson that, based on its author's background, they had reason to
believe it was a "handbook on computer crime."  It was therefore
inappropriate for publication, 1st Amendment or no 1st Amendment.

I got a copy of the game from the trunk of The Mentor's car in an
Austin parking lot.  Like the Bell South document, it seemed pretty
innocuous to me, if a little inscrutable.   Borrowing its flavor from the
works of William Gibson and Austin sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, it is
filled with silicon brain implants, holodecks, and gauss guns.

It is, as the cover copy puts it, "a fusion of the dystopian visions of
George Orwell and Timothy Leary." Actually, without the gizmos, it
describes a future kind of like the present its publisher is
experiencing at the hands of the Secret Service.

An unbelievably Byzantine world resides within its 120 large pages
of small print.  (These roll-players must be some kind of idiots
savants...)  Indeed, it's a thing of such complexity that I can't swear
there's no criminal information in there, but then I can't swear that
Grateful Dead records don't have satanic messages if played
backwards.  Anything's possible, especially inside something as
remarkable as Cyberpunk.

The most remarkable thing about Cyberpunk is the fact that it was
printed at all.  After much negotiation, Jackson was able to get the
Secret Service to let him have some of his data back.  However, they
told him that he would be limited to an hour and a half with only one
of his three computers.  Also, according to Jackson, "They insisted
that all the copies be made by a Secret Service agent who was a two-
finger typist.  So we didn't get much. "

In the end, Jackson and his staff had to reconstruct most of the game
from neural rather than magnetic memory.  They did have a few very
old backups, and they retrieved some scraps which had been passed
around to game testers.  They also had the determination of the
enraged.

Despite government efforts to impose censorship by prior restraint,
Cyberpunk is now on the market.  Presumably, advertising it as "The
book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service" will invigorate sales.
But Steve Jackson Games, the heretofore prosperous publisher of
more than a hundred role-playing games, has been forced to lay off
more than half of its employees and may well be mortally wounded.

Any employer who has heard this tale will think hard before he hires
a computer cracker.  Which may be, of course, among the effects the
Secret Service desires.

******


On May 8, 1990, Operation Sun Devil, heretofore an apparently
random and nameless trickle of Secret Service actions, swept down
on the Legion of Doom and its ilk like a bureaucratic tsunami.  On
that day, the Secret Service served 27 search warrants in 14 cities from
Plano, Texas to New York, New York.

The law had come to Cyberspace.  When the day was over, transit
through the wide open spaces of the Virtual World would be a lot
trickier.

In a press release following the sweep, the Secret Service boasted
having shut down numerous computer bulletin boards, confiscated
40 computers, and seized 23,000 disks.  They noted in their statement
that "the conceivable criminal violations of this operation have
serious implications for the health and welfare of all individuals,
corporations, and United States Government agencies relying on
computers and telephones to communicate."

It was unclear from their statement whether "this operation" meant
the Legion of Doom or Operation Sun Devil.  There was room to
interpret it either way.

Because the deliciously ironic truth is that, aside from the 3 page Bell
South document, the hackers had neither removed nor damaged
anyone's data. Operation Sun Devil, on the other hand, had "serious
implications" for a number of folks who relied on "computers and
telephones to communicate." They lost the equivalent of about 5.4
million pages of information.  Not to mention a few computers and
telephones.

And the welfare of the individuals behind those figures was surely in
jeopardy.  Like the story of the single mother and computer
consultant in Baltimore whose sole means of supporting herself and
her 18 year old son was stripped away early one morning.  Secret
Service agents broke down her door with sledge hammers, entered
with guns drawn, and seized all her computer equipment.
Apparently her son had also been using it...

Or the father in New York who opened the door at 6:00 AM and
found a shotgun at his nose.  A dozen agents entered.  While one of
the kept the man's wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot
and entered the bedroom of their sleeping 14 year-old.  Before
leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment in the
house, including all the telephones.

It was enough to suggest that the insurance companies should start
writing policies against capricious governmental seizure of circuitry.

In fairness, one can imagine the government's problem.  This is all
pretty magical stuff  to them.  If I were trying to terminate the
operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight.
How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway
vehicles?

But as I heard more and more about the vile injustices being heaped
on my young pals in the Legion of Doom, not to mention the
unfortunate folks nearby, the less I was inclined toward such
temperate thoughts as these.  I drifted back into a 60's-style sense of
the government, thinking it a thing of monolithic and evil efficiency
and adopting an up-against-the-wall willingness to spit words like
"pig" or "fascist" into my descriptions.

In doing so, I endowed the Secret Service with a clarity of intent
which no agency of government will ever possess.  Despite almost
every experience I've ever had with federal authority, I keep
imagining its competence.

For some reason, it was easier to invest the Keystone Kapers of
Operation Sun Devil with malign purpose rather than confront their
absurdity straight-on.  There is, after all, a twisted kind of comfort in
political paranoia.  It provides one such a sense of orderliness to think
that the government is neither crazy nor stupid and that its plots,
though wicked, are succinct.

I was about to have an experience which would restore both my
natural sense of unreality and my unwillingness to demean the
motives of others.  I was about to see first hand the disorientation of
the law in the featureless vastness of Cyberspace.



********

In Search of NuPrometheus


"I pity the poor immigrant..."

--    Bob Dylan


Sometime last June, an angry hacker got hold of a chunk of the highly
secret source code which drives the Apple Macintosh.  He then
distributed it to a variety of addresses, claiming responsibility for this
act of information terrorism in the name of the Nu  Prometheus
League.

Apple freaked.  NuPrometheus had stolen, if not the Apple crown
jewels, at least a stone from them.  Worse, NuPrometheus had then
given this prize away.  Repeatedly.

All Apple really has to offer the world is the software which lies
encoded in silicon on the ROM chip of every Macintosh.  This set of
instructions is the cyber-DNA which makes a Macintosh a Macintosh.

Worse, much of the magic in this code was put there by people who
not only do not work for Apple any longer, but might only do so
again if encouraged with cattle prods.  Apple's attitude toward its
ROM code is a little like that of a rich kid toward his inheritance.  Not
actually knowing how to create wealth himself, he guards what he
has with hysterical fervor.

Time passed, and I forgot about the incident.  But one recent May
morning, I leaned that others had not.  The tireless search for the
spectral heart of NuPrometheus finally reached Pinedale, Wyoming,
where I was the object of a two hour interview by Special Agent
Richard Baxter, Jr.  of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Poor Agent Baxter didn't know a ROM chip from a Vise-grip when
he arrived, so much of that time was spent trying to educate him on
the nature of the thing which had been stolen.  Or whether "stolen"
was the right term for what had happened to it.

You know things have rather jumped the groove when potential
suspects must explain to law enforcers the nature of their alleged
perpetrations.

I wouldn't swear Agent Baxter ever got it quite right.  After I showed
him some actual source code, gave a demonstration of e-mail in
action, and downloaded a file  from the WELL, he took to rubbing his
face with both hands, peering up over his finger tips and saying, "It
sure is something, isn't it"  Or, "Whooo-ee."

Or "my eight year-old knows more about these things than I do."  He
didn't say this with a father's pride so much as an immigrant's fear of
a strange new land into which he will be forcibly moved and in
which his own child is a native.  He looked across my keyboard into
Cyberspace and didn't like what he saw.

We could have made it harder for one another, but I think we each
sensed that the other occupied a world which was as bizarre and
nonsensical as it could be. We did our mutual best to suppress
immune response at the border.

You'd have thought his world might have been a little more
recognizable to me.  Not so, it turns out.  Because in his world, I
found several unfamiliar features, including these:

1.    The Hacker's Conference is an underground organization of
computer outlaws with likely connections to, and almost certainly
sympathy with, the NuPrometheus League.  (Or as Agent Baxter
repeatedly put it, the "New Prosthesis League.")

 2.    John Draper, the affore-mentioned Cap'n Crunch, in addition to
being a known member of the Hacker's Conference, is also CEO
and president of Autodesk, Inc.  This is of particular concern to
the  FBI because Autodesk has many top-secret contracts with the
government to supply Star Wars graphics imaging and
"hyperspace" technology.  Worse, Draper is thought to have
Soviet contacts.

He wasn't making this up.  He had lengthy documents from the San
Francisco office to prove it.  And in which Autodesk's address was
certainly correct.

On the other hand, I know John Draper. While, as I say, he may have
once distinguished himself as a cracker during the Pleistocene, he is
not now, never has been, and never will be CEO of Autodesk.  He did
work there for awhile last year, but he was let go long before he got
in a position to take over.

Nor is Autodesk, in my experience with it, the Star Wars skunk
works which Agent Baxter's documents indicated.  One could hang
out there a long time without ever seeing any gold braid.

Their primary product is something called AutoCAD, by far the most
popular computer-aided design software but generally lacking in
lethal potential.  They do have a small development program in
Cyberspace, which is what they call Virtual Reality.  (This, I assume is
the "hyperspace" to which Agent Baxter's documents referred.)

However, Autodesk had reduced its Cyberspace program to a couple
of programmers. I imagined Randy Walser and Carl Tollander toiling
away in the dark and lonely service of their country.  Didn't work.
Then I tried to describe Virtual Reality to Agent Baxter, but that
didn't work either.  In fact, he tilted.  I took several runs at it, but I
could tell I was violating our border agreements. These seemed to
include a requirement that neither of us try to drag the other across
into his conceptual zone.

I fared a little better on the Hacker's Conference.  Hardly a
conspiracy, the Hacker's Conference is an annual convention
originated in 1984 by the Point Foundation and the editors of Whole
Earth Review.  Each year it invites about a hundred of the most gifted
and accomplished of digital creators. Indeed, they are the very people
who have conducted the personal computer revolution.  Agent Baxter
looked at my list of Hacker's Conference attendees and read their
bios.

"These are the people who actually design this stuff, aren't they?"  He
was incredulous.  Their corporate addresses didn't fit his model of
outlaws at all well.

Why had he come all the way to Pinedale to investigate a crime he
didn't understand which had taken place (sort of) in 5 different
places, none of which was within 500 miles?

Well, it seems Apple has told the FBI that they can expect little
cooperation from Hackers in and around the Silicon Valley, owing to
virulent anti-Apple sentiment there.  They claim this is due to the
Hacker belief that software should be free combined with festering
resentment of Apple's commercial success.  They advised the FBI to
question only those Hackers who were as far as possible from the
twisted heart of the subculture.

They did have their eye on some local people though.  These
included a couple of former Apple employees, Grady Ward and
Water Horat, Chuck Farnham (who has made a living out of
harassing Apple), Glenn Tenney (the purported leader of the
Hackers), and, of course, the purported CEO of Autodesk.

Other folks Agent Baxter asked me about included Mitch Kapor, who
wrote Lotus 1-2-3 and was  known to have received some this
mysterious source code.  Or whatever.  But I had also met Mitch
Kapor, both on the WELL and in person.  A less likely computer
terrorist would be hard to come by.

Actually, the question of the source code was another area where
worlds but shadow-boxed.  Although Agent Baxter didn't know
source code from Tuesday, he did know that Apple Computer had
told his agency that what had been stolen and disseminated was the
complete recipe for a Macintosh computer.  The distribution of this
secret formula might result in the creation of millions of Macintoshes
not made by Apple.  And, of course, the ruination of Apple
Computer.

In my world, NuPrometheus (whoever they, or more likely, he might
be) had distributed a small portion of the code which related
specifically to Color QuickDraw.  QuickDraw is Apple's name for the
software which controls the Mac's on-screen graphics.  But this was
another detail which  Agent Baxter could not capture.  For all he
knew, you could grow Macintoshes from floppy disks.

I explained to him that Apple was alleging something like the ability
to assemble an entire human being from the recipe for a foot, but
even he know the analogy was inexact.  And trying to get him to
accept the idea that a corporation could go mad with suspicion was
quite futile.  He had a far different perception of the emotional
reliability of institutions.

When he finally left, we were both dazzled and disturbed.  I spent
some time thinking about Le