The Hacker Crackdown Part 41

A devotee of the 2600 circle and stalwart of the New York hackers' group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was a splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as committed dissident.

The eighteen-year-old Optik, a high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman, was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking digital dude who was utterly and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules but his own.

By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in Harper's, Esquire, The New York Times, in countless public debates and conventions, even on a television show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other Well mavens, Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well celebrity. Strangely, despite his th.o.r.n.y att.i.tude and utter single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed to arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met him.

He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to swagger, and, better yet, to actually DEMONSTRATE some off-the-wall digital stunt.

He was a born media darling.

Even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly unworldly and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker. He was so bold, so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even those who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered seal pup.

In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther King Day Crash), Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third NYC scofflaw named Scorpion were raided by the Secret Service. Their computers went out the door, along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact disks, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik were accused of having caused the Crash.

The mills of justice ground slowly. The case eventually fell into the hands of the New York State Police. Phiber had lost his machinery in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him for over a year.

His predicament was extensively publicized on the Well, where it caused much resentment for police tactics. It's one thing to merely hear about a hacker raided or busted; it's another to see the police attacking someone you've come to know personally, and who has explained his motives at length.

Through the Harper's debate on the Well, it had become clear to the Wellbeings that Phiber Optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything."

In their own salad days, many Wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in pitched street-battles with police. They were inclined to indulgence for acts of civil disobedience.

Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness of a typical hacker search-and-seizure. It took no great stretch of imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same treatment.

As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to sour, and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw deal from the ham-handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of Harper's magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion was a "crime"

at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves."

In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home, Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree Computer Tampering and Computer Trespa.s.s, New York state offenses.

He was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.

This pa.s.sing hara.s.sment from the unfathomable world of straight people seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all. Deprived of his computer by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of television cameras.

The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik, but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound. As 1990 rolled on, the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil.

The rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.

The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;"

if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better.

They had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted vilification campaign.

Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating the controversy often stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they commonly dusted themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

It was as if it were TOO MUCH TO BELIEVE that a 1960s freak from the Grateful Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation head-to-head and ACTUALLY SEEMED TO BE WINNING!

Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle of this kind. He had no formal legal or technical credentials.

Barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance.

He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.

The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency in literary, artistic, or musical circles. A gifted critic can wield great artistic influence simply through defining the temper of the times, by coining the catch-phrases and the terms of debate that become the common currency of the period.

(And as it happened, Barlow WAS a part-time art critic, with a special fondness for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)

Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's striking science-fictional term "cybers.p.a.ce" as a synonym for the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks.

Barlow was insistent that cybers.p.a.ce should be regarded as a qualitatively new world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of electronic communications, now made visible through the computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead, it had become a PLACE, cybers.p.a.ce, which demanded a new set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this concept of cybers.p.a.ce was picked up by Time, Scientific American, computer police, hackers, and even Const.i.tutional scholars. "Cybers.p.a.ce" now seems likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.

Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded, deep-voiced Wyomingan in a das.h.i.+ng Western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful Dead cloisonne lapel pin.

Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element.

Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones,"

with their uptight, inst.i.tutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by bra.s.s-hats and jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was a cybers.p.a.ce ad-hocrat par excellence.

There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow, and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only seemed to REQUIRE a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd ever bargained for.

Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they liked it not one whit better than he did.

One of these was Mitch.e.l.l Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation.

Kapor had written-off the pa.s.sing indignity of being fingerprinted down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor.

The issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the Secret Service swung into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm.

As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed Kapor for a California computer journal. Like most people who met Barlow, Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation.

Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the Whole Earth Catalogsince the beginning, and treasured a complete run of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet.

In pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.

The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto, "Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's, intention to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of the Const.i.tution into Cybers.p.a.ce."

Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would "fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fas.h.i.+on which is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconst.i.tutional."

"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer networking channels, and also printed in the Whole Earth Review.

The sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak (perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation.

John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore, an ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and corporate computer-a.s.sisted surveillance of private citizens.

A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies: Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers Jaron Lanier and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on a formal t.i.tle: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated.

Kapor became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared "the home of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like their nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s--people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot, who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to dominate a glittering new industry--had always made very good copy.

But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed nonplussed by the self-declared "civilizers of cybers.p.a.ce."

EFF's insistence that the war against "hackers" involved grave Const.i.tutional civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially since none of EFF's organizers were lawyers or established politicians. The business press in particular found it easier to seize on the apparent core of the story-- that high-tech entrepreneur Mitch.e.l.l Kapor had established a "defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a genuinely important political development--or merely a clique of wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the proper authorities?

The jury was still out.

But the stage was now set for open confrontation.

And the first and the most critical battle was the hacker show-trial of "Knight Lightning."

It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers only by their "handles." There is little to gain by giving the real names of these people, many of whom are juveniles, many of whom have never been convicted of any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting parents who have already suffered enough.

But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990, made this particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure.

It can do no particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat the long-established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (p.r.o.nounced NYE-dorf).

Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the Honorable Nicholas J. Bua presiding. The United States of America was the plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney was Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.

The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and David A. Glockner, all a.s.sistant United States Attorneys.

The Secret Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.

It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground hacker "magazine" called Phrack. Phrack was an entirely electronic publication, distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic networks.