Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown

The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial, both sides deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent that would stake-out big claims for their interests in cyberspace. Jackson and his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that the least e-mail remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer deserves the same somber civil-rights protection as that afforded *The New York Times.* By stark contrast, the Secret Service's attorneys argued boldly that the contents of an electronic bulletin board have no more expectation of privacy than a heap of postcards. In the final analysis, very little was firmly nailed down. Formally, the legal rulings in the Jackson case apply only in the federal Western District of Texas. It was, however, established that these were real civil-liberties issues that powerful people were prepared to go to the courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems, though it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the seizer. The Secret Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a thousand dollars each to three of Jackson's angry and offended board users. And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the single-line bulletin board system "Illuminati" seized in 1990, now rejoices in possession of a huge privately-owned Internet node, "io.com," with dozens of phone-lines on its own T-1 trunk.

Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of his case available electronically, for interested parties. And yet, the Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal seems likely and the EFF is also gravely dissatisfied with the ruling on electronic interception.

The WELL, home of the American electronic civil libertarian movement, added two thousand more users and dropped its aging Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new Sun Sparcstation. Search-and-seizure dicussions on the WELL are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic in digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption for private citizens.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the Clinton Administration. Its new executive director, ECPA pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained a reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels of the computer and telecommunications industry. EFF's pro- encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of highly variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the FBI and the NSA.

EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection to an institution. EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own success, by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF guru and gray eminence. John Perry Barlow, for his part, left Wyoming, quit the Republican Party, and moved to New York City, accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones. Mike Godwin left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal adviser to the electronically afflicted.

After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal wiretapping. Many civil libertarians, who regarded the practice of wiretapping with deep occult horror, were crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known "hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended police and public interests in official eavesdropping. However, no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr. Denning in the slightest. She not only made up her own mind, she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.

In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception, Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the machineries of legal prosecution. Acid Phreak and Scorpion were sent to prison for six months, six months of home detention, 750 hours of community service, and, oddly, a $50 fine for conspiracy to commit computer crime. Phiber Optik, the computer intruder with perhaps the highest public profile in the entire world, took the longest to plead guilty, but, facing the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally did so. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet, Leftist and Urvile... Urvile now works for a software company in Atlanta. He is still on probation and still repaying his enormous fine. In fifteen months, he will once again be allowed to own a personal computer. He is still a convicted federal felon, but has not had any legal difficulties since leaving prison. He has lost contact with Prophet and Leftist. Unfortunately, so have I, though not through lack of honest effort.

Knight Lightning, now 24, is a technical writer for the federal government in Washington DC. He has still not been accepted into law school, but having spent more than his share of time in the company of attorneys, he's come to think that maybe an MBA would be more to the point. He still owes his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling steadily since he is manfully working two jobs. Knight Lightning customarily wears a suit and tie and carries a valise. He has a federal security clearance.

Unindicted *Phrack* co-editor Taran King is also a technical writer in Washington DC, and recently got married.

Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale Internet node, "netsys.com." He programs professionally for a company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.

Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system are rather more complex than they at first appear to be.

Gail Thackeray briefly considered going into private security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa County District Attorney's Office (with a salary). She is still vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix, Arizona.

The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.

As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-). I thankfully abandoned my brief career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a new science fiction novel, *Heavy Weather,* and assembled a new collection of short stories, *Globalhead.* I also write nonfiction regularly, for the popular-science column in *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.*

I like life better on the far side of the boundary between fantasy and reality; but I've come to recognize that reality has an unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own purposes. That's why I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for EFF- Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group (eff- austin@tic.com). I don't think I will ever get over my experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest of my life.

It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book on computer crime and civil liberties issues. I truly believe that I could write another book much like this one, every year. Cyberspace is very big. There's a lot going on out there, far more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though growing, cadre of network-literate reporters. I do wish I could do more work on this topic, because the various people of cyberspace are an element of our society that definitely requires sustained study and attention.

But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my mind, and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more imagination than discipline. Having done my stint as an electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those stalwart few who do it every day. I may return to this topic some day, but I have no real plans to do so. However, I didn't have any real plans to write "Hacker Crackdown," either. Things happen, nowadays. There are landslides in cyberspace. I'll just have to try and stay alert and on my feet.