crime and puzzlement.txt

黑客培训教程

circumstance.  On the other end, free-lancers and ne'er-do-wells 
cavort about, getting by on luck  if they get by at all.  

However you cast these poles, it comes down to the difference 
between those who see life as a struggle against cosmic peril and 
human infamy and those who believe, without any hard evidence, 
that the universe is actually on our side.  Fear vs. Faith.

I am of the latter group.  Along with Gandhi and Rebecca of 
Sunnybrook Farm, I believe that other human beings will quite 
consistently merit my trust if I'm not doing something which scares 
them or makes them feel bad about themselves.  In other words, the 
best defense is a good way to get hurt.  

In spite of the fact that this system works very reliably for me and my 
kind, I find we are increasingly in the minority.  More and more of 
our neighbors live in armed compounds.  Alarms blare continuously.  
Potentially happy people give their lives over to the corporate state as 
though the world were so dangerous outside its veil of collective 
immunity that they have no choice.  

I have a number of theories as to why this is happening.  One has to 
do with the opening of Cyberspace.  As a result of this development, 
humanity is now undergoing the most profound transformation of its 
history.  Coming into the Virtual World, we inhabit Information.  
Indeed, we become Information.  Thought is embodied and the Flesh 
is made Word.  It's weird as hell. 

Beginning with the invention of the telegraph and extending through 
television into Virtual Reality, we have been, for a over a century, 
experiencing a terrifying erosion in our sense of both body and place.  
As we begin to realize the enormity of what is happening to us, all 
but the most courageous have gotten scared.  

And everyone, regardless of his psychic resilience, feels this 
overwhelming sense of strangeness.  The world, once so certain and 
tangible and legally precise, has become an infinite layering of 
opinions, perceptions, litigation, camera-angles, data, white noise, 
and, most of all, ambiguities.  Those of us who are of the fearful 
persuasion do not like ambiguities.  

Indeed, if one were a little jumpy to start with, he may now be fairly 
humming with nameless dread.  Since no one likes his dread to be 
nameless, the first order of business is to find it some names.

For a long time here in the United States, Communism provided a 
kind of catch-all bogeyman.  Marx, Stalin and Mao summoned forth 
such a spectre that, to many Americans, annihilation of all life was 
preferable to the human portion's becoming Communist.  But as Big 
Red wizened and lost his teeth, we began to cast about for a 
replacement.  

Finding none of sufficient individual horror, we have draped a 
number of objects with the old black bunting which once shrouded 
the Kremlin.  Our current spooks are terrorists, child abductors, 
AIDS, and the underclass.  I would say drugs, but anyone who thinks 
that the War on Drugs is not actually the War on the Underclass 
hasn't been paying close enough attention. 

There are a couple of problems with these Four Horsemen.  For one 
thing, they aren't actually very dangerous.  For example, only 7 
Americans died in worldwide terrorist attacks in 1987.  Fewer than 10 
(out of about 70 million) children are abducted by strangers in the 
U.S. each year.  Your chances of getting AIDS if you are neither gay 
nor a hemophiliac nor a junkie are considerably less than your 
chances of getting killed by lightning while golfing.  The underclass is 
dangerous, of course, but only, with very few exceptions, if you are a 
member of it.

The other problem with these perils is that they are all physical.  If we 
are entering into a world in which no one has a body, physical threats 
begin to lose their sting.  

And now I come to the point of this screed:  The perfect bogeyman 
for Modern Times is the Cyberpunk!  He is so smart he makes you 
feel even more stupid than you usually do.  He knows this complex 
country in which you're perpetually lost.  He understands the value 
of things you can't conceptualize long enough to cash in on.  He is the 
one-eyed man in the Country of the Blind.

In a world where you and your wealth consist of nothing but beeps 
and boops of micro-voltage, he can steal all your assets in 
nanoseconds and then make you disappear.  

He can even reach back out of his haunted mists and kill you 
physically.  Among the justifications for Operation Sun Devil was 
this chilling tidbit:

"Hackers had the ability to access and review the files of hospital patients.   
Furthermore,  they could have  added, deleted, or altered vital patient 
information, possibly  causing life- threatening situations." 

Perhaps the most frightening thing about the Cyberpunk is the 
danger he presents to The Institution, whether corporate or 
governmental.  If you are frightened you have almost certainly taken 
shelter by now in one of these collective organisms, so the very last 
thing you want is something which can endanger your heretofore 
unassailable hive.  

And make no mistake, crackers will become to bureaucratic bodies 
what viruses presently are to human bodies.  Thus, Operation Sun 
Devil can be seen as the first of many waves of organizational 
immune response to this new antigen.  Agent Baxter was a T-cell.  
Fortunately, he didn't know that himself and I was very careful not to 
show him my own antigenic tendencies.

I think that herein lies the way out of what might otherwise become 
an Armageddon between the control freaks and the neo-hip.  Those 
who are comfortable with these disorienting changes must do 
everything in our power to convey that comfort to others.  In other 
words, we must share our sense of hope and opportunity with those 
who feel that in Cyberspace they will be obsolete eunuchs for sure.                        

It's a tall order.  But, my silicon brothers, our self-interest is strong.  If 
we come on as witches, they will burn us.  If we volunteer to guide 
them gently into its new lands, the Virtual World might be a more 
amiable place for all of us than this one has been.

Of course, we may also have to fight.

******     

Defining the conceptual and legal map of Cyberspace before the 
ambiguophobes do it for us (with punitive over-precision) is going to 
require some effort.  We can't expect the Constitution to take care of 
itself.  Indeed, the precedent for mitigating the Constitutional 
protection of a new medium has already been established.  Consider 
what happened to radio in the early part of this century.

Under the pretext of allocating limited bandwidth, the government 
established an early right of censorship over broadcast content which 
still seems directly unconstitutional to me.  Except that it stuck.  And 
now, owing to a large body of case law, looks to go on sticking.

New media, like any chaotic system, are highly sensitive to initial 
conditions.  Today's heuristical answers of the moment become 
tomorrow's permanent institutions of both law and expectation.  
Thus, they bear examination with that destiny in mind.

Earlier in this article, I asked a number of tough questions relating to 
the nature of property, privacy, and speech in the digital domain.  
Questions like:  "What are data and what is free speech?" or  "How 
does one treat property which has no physical form and can be 
infinitely reproduced?"  or  "Is a computer the same as a printing 
press."  The events of Operation Sun Devil were nothing less than an 
effort to provide answers to these questions.  Answers which  would 
greatly enhance governmental ability to silence the future's 
opinionated nerds.  

In over-reaching as extravagantly as they did, the Secret Service may 
actually have done a service for those of us who love liberty.  They 
have provided us with a devil.  And devils, among their other 
galvanizing virtues, are just great for clarifying the issues and putting 
iron in your spine.  In the presence of a devil, it's always easier to 
figure out where you stand.  

While I previously had felt no stake in the obscure conundra of free 
telecommunication, I was, thanks to Operation Sun Devil, suddenly 
able to plot a trajectory from the current plight of the Legion of Doom 
to an eventual constraint on opinions much dearer to me.  I 
remembered Martin Neimoeller, who said:

"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up  
because I wasn't a  Communist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't 
speak up because I  wasn't a Jew.   They came for the trade unionists, and I 
didn't speak up because I wasn't a  trade unionist.   Then they came for the 
Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a  Protestant.  Then  they came 
for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up." 

I decided it was time for me to speak up.  

The evening of my visit from Agent Baxter, I wrote an account of it 
which I placed on the WELL.   Several days later, Mitch Kapor 
literally dropped by for a chat.  

Also a WELL denizen, he had read about Agent Baxter and had 
begun to meditate on the inappropriateness of leaving our civil 
liberties to be defined by the technologically benighted.  A man who 
places great emphasis on face-to-face contact, he wanted to discuss 
this issue with me in person.  He had been flying his Canadair bizjet 
to a meeting in California when he realized his route took him 
directly over Pinedale. 

We talked for a couple of hours in my office while a spring 
snowstorm swirled outside.  When I recounted for him what I had 
learned about Operation Sun Devil, he decided it was time for him to 
speak up too.

He called a few days later with the phone number of a civil 
libertarian named Harvey Silverglate, who, as evidence of his 
conviction that everyone deserves due process, is   currently 
defending Leona Helmsley.  Mitch asked me to tell Harvey what I 
knew, with the inference that he would help support the costs which 
are liable to arise whenever you tell a lawyer anything.

I found Harvey in New York at the offices of that city's most 
distinguished constitutional law firm, Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, 
Krinsky, and Lieberman.  These are the folks who made it possible 
for the New York Times to print the Pentagon Papers.  (Not to dwell 
on the unwilling notoriety which partner Leonard Boudin achieved 
back in 1970 when his Weathergirl daughter blew up the family 
home...)

In the conference call which followed, I could almost hear the skeletal 
click as their jaws dropped.  The next day, Eric Lieberman and Terry 
Gross of Rabinowitz, Boudin met with Acid Phreak, Phiber Optik, 
and Scorpion.

The maddening trouble with writing this account is that Whole Earth 
Review, unlike, say, Phrack, doesn't publish instantaneously.  Events 
are boiling up at such a frothy pace that anything I say about current 
occurrences surely will not obtain by the time you read this.  The 
road from here is certain to fork many times.  The printed version of 
this will seem downright quaint before it's dry.

But as of today (in early June of 1990), Mitch and I are legally 
constituting the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a two (or possibly 
three) man organization which will raise and disburse funds for 
education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital 
speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace.

Already, on the strength of preliminary stories about our efforts in 
the Washington Post and the New York Times, Mitch has received an 
offer from Steve Wozniak to match whatever funds he dedicates to 
this effort.  (As well as a fair amount of abuse from the more 
institutionalized precincts of the computer industry.)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation will 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 fashion which is arbitrary, oppressive, and 
unconstitutional. 

In addition, we will work with the Computer Professionals for Social 
Responsibility and other organizations to convey to both the public 
and the policy-makers metaphors which will illuminate the more 
general stake in liberating Cyberspace.  

Not everyone will agree.  Crackers are, after all, generally beyond 
public sympathy.  Actions on their behalf are not going to be popular 
no matter who else might benefit from them in the long run.  

Nevertheless, in the litigations and political debates which are certain 
to follow, we will endeavor to assure that their electronic speech is 
protected as certainly as any opinions which are printed or, for that 
matter, screamed.  We will make an effort to clarify issues 
surrounding the distribution of intellectual property.  And we will 
help to create for America a future which is as blessed by the Bill of 
Rights as its past has been.

     
     

John Perry Barlow
[e-mail]
Friday, June 8, 1990