The Hacker Crackdown Part 39

The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have followed it thus far, has been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal.

The story of the Civil Libertarians, though it partakes of all those other aspects, is profoundly and thoroughly POLITICAL.

In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the owners.h.i.+p and nature of cybers.p.a.ce became loudly and irretrievably public.

People from some of the oddest corners of American society suddenly found themselves public figures. Some of these people found this situation much more than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled, and tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy subcultural niches. This was generally to prove a mistake.

But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-pounding, persuading, touring, negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to interviews, squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.

It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this compet.i.tive advantage.

The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite.

They find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their actions in front of the general public. Actually, hackers roundly despise the "ignorant" public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of cla.s.s warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism.

Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and preserve their underground reputations. But if they speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile surface-tension of the underground, and they will be harra.s.sed or arrested. Over the longer term, most hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give up.

As a political force, the digital underground is hamstrung.

The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted seige.

They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated public image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one another with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't trust the public's judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded.

Should the general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand its own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave threat to the specialized technical power and authority that the telcos have relished for over a century. The telcos do have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise, influence in the halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement, and unbelievably vast amounts of money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine gra.s.sroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends.

Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.

But cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they feel will meet their inst.i.tutional purposes and further public order. Cops have respect, they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets and even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly well in limelight. When pressed, they will step out in the public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the naive and misguided.

But then they go back within their time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom and the rule-book.

The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern truism that communication is power. Publicity is power.

Soundbites are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public agenda--and KEEP IT THERE--is power. Fame is power. Simple personal fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the public's eye and ear.

The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power"-- though they all owned computers, most were not particularly advanced computer experts. They had a good deal of money, but nowhere near the earthshaking wealth and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or federal agencies.

They had no ability to arrest people. They carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.

But they really knew how to network.

Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public hurly-burly. They have lectured audiences galore and talked to countless journalists, and have learned to refine their spiels. They've kept the cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes and spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance.

In an information society, this open, overt, obvious activity has proven to be a profound advantage.

In 1990, the civil libertarians of cybers.p.a.ce a.s.sembled out of nowhere in particular, at warp speed. This "group"

(actually, a networking gaggle of interested parties which scarcely deserves even that loose term) has almost nothing in the way of formal organization. Those formal civil libertarian organizations which did take an interest in cybers.p.a.ce issues, mainly the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and the American Civil Liberties Union, were carried along by events in 1990, and acted mostly as adjuncts, underwriters or launching-pads.

The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success of any of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990. At this writing, their future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their hands.

This should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.

In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino, California, had a problem. Someone had illicitly copied a small piece of Apple's proprietary software, software which controlled an internal chip driving the Macintosh screen display. This Color QuickDraw source code was a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property.

Only trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.

But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise.

This person (or persons) made several illicit copies of this source code, perhaps as many as two dozen.

He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America: people in the computer industry who were a.s.sociated with, but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.

The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological, and very hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it will be recalled, stole the fire of the G.o.ds and gave this potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden mankind. A similar G.o.d-in-the-manger att.i.tude was implied for the corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu" Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demiG.o.d.

The illicitly copied data was given away for free.

The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the fate of the ancient Greek Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for centuries by the vengeful G.o.ds while an eagle tore and ate his liver. On the other hand, NuPrometheus chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role model.

The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else).

Instead of giving fire to mankind, it was more as if NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic lighter.

The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage.

It was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the face for the Apple corporate heirarchy.

Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. Apple's founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both taken their leave long since. Their raucous core of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew of 1960s Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with the new b.u.t.ton-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple. Many of the programmers and developers who had invented the Macintosh model in the early 1980s had also taken their leave of the company. It was they, not the current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The NuPrometheus stunt was well-calculated to wound company morale.

Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in high-profile intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft of trade secrets. These were likely the right people to call, and rumor has it that the ent.i.ties responsible were in fact discovered by the FBI, and then quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed.

But there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software.

Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.

In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI.

One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most unusual man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is perhaps best known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics for "h.e.l.l in a Bucket," "Pica.s.so Moon," "Mexicali Blues," "I Need a Miracle,"

and many more; he has been writing for the band since 1970.

Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer-crime case, it might be well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead.

The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and lysergic transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-s.h.i.+rts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use.

The symbols, and the realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful Dead like knotted macrame.

The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees are radical Bohemians. This much is widely understood.

Exactly what this implies in the 1990s is rather more problematic.

The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy entertainers: number 20, according to Forbes magazine, right between M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars.

They have been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.

And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit tax specialists--they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians-- this money has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess.

The Dead have been quietly active for many years, funding various worthy activities in their extensive and widespread cultural community.

The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American power establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force to be reckoned with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many places, both likely and unlikely.

The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist rhetoric, but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On the contrary, like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy.

And their fancy is quite extensive.

The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers, lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's co-founder, used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.

These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours.

John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He is, however, a ranking Deadhead.

Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the mark, either.

But Barlow might be better described as a "poet"--if one keeps in mind Percy Sh.e.l.ley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. In 1987, he narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the Wyoming State Senate. Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early forties, married and the father of three daughters.

Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of consistency.

In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications devotee.