The Hacker Crackdown-by Bruce Sterling

 

The Hacker Crackdown-by Bruce Sterling

 

 

This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz- kids, and lawyers, and

hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies, and

high-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security

experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.

This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s. It concerns

activities that take place inside computers and over telephone lines.

A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982.

But the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred

and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation

appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic

device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other

city. *The place between* the phones. The indefinite place *out there,*

where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.

Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.

Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This "place"

is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people

have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public communication

by wire and electronics.

People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. Some people

became rich and famous from their efforts there. Some just played in

it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and

regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one

another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years.

And almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in

this place.

But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once

thin and dark and one-dimensional — little more than a narrow speaking-

tube, stretching from phone to phone — has flung itself open like a

gigantic jack-in- the- box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of

the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has

become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the

world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television,

and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you

can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense

today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.

Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few

technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people.

And not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over

weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a

"Matrix," international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It's

growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.

People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. Scientists and

technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. But

increasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and

lawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their careers

there now, "on-line" in vast government data- banks; and so do spies,

industrial, political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a

few of them. And there are children living there now.

People have met there and been married there. There are entire living

communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossipping, planning,

conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic

mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data, both

legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another computer

software and the occasional festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are feeling

our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising. Our lives

in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect,

despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are imperfect by

their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace. The way we

live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real

world. We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.

This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically, this book is about

certain strange events in the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling

year for the the growing world of computerized communications.

In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer hackers,

with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial, several

guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the

USA.

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more

deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave new

world of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone

security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country

all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of America's

electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed

results.

The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred the

creation, within "the computer community," of the Electronic Frontier

Foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to the

establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The crackdown,

remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic

crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and

seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics

follow.

This is the story of the people of cyberspace.