The Hacker Crackdown Part 4

After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble.

In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall Street.

At this point, history might have taken a different turn.

American might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen considered this an excellent solution.

But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of large-scale communications. Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the technological edge once again.

The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest "audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913 they gave Vail's company the best LONG-DISTANCE lines ever built. By controlling long-distance--the links between, and over, and above the smaller local phone companies--AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.

Vail plowed the profits back into research and development, starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial research.

Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered the opposition. Independent telephone companies never became entirely extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today.

But Vail's AT&T became the supreme communications company.

At one point, Vail's AT&T bought Western Union itself, the very company that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy."

Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound business along his modern principles; but when the federal government grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely gave Western Union back.

This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar events had happened in American steel, oil, and railroads.

But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to remain supreme.

The monopoly robber-barons of those other industries were humbled and shattered by government trust-busting.

Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to accommodate the US government; in fact he would forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the American government, almost another Post Office--though not quite. AT&T would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would use the government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out compet.i.tors and a.s.sure the Bell system's profits and preeminence.

This was the second birth--the political birth--of the American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.

His system was an odd kind of American industrial socialism.

It was born at about the same time as Leninist Communism, and it lasted almost as long--and, it must be admitted, to considerably better effect.

Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aeros.p.a.ce, there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the telephone. The telephone was seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail, was a profoundly democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS.

Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very American ring to it.

The American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of government or business, but a general public utility.

At first, it was true, only the wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued the business markets primarily. The American phone system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity.

But from the first, almost all communities with telephone service had public telephones. And many stores--especially drugstores-- offered public use of their phones. You might not own a telephone-- but you could always get into the system, if you really needed to.

There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones "public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act of trust in the public. This decision was a political one, informed by the basic values of the American republic.

The situation might have been very different; and in other countries, under other systems, it certainly was.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution.

Stalin was certain that publicly accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments of Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel The First Circle describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited to Stalinist purposes.)

France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too anarchical and frivolous.

For decades, nineteenth-century France communicated via the "visual telegraph," a nation-spanning, government-owned semaph.o.r.e system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.

In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaph.o.r.e enthusiast, memorably uttered an early version of what might be called "the security expert's argument" against the open media.

"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.

It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards, b.u.ms, etc. . . . The electric telegraph meets those destructive elements with only a few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single man could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong armed men. Yes, I declare, subst.i.tution of the electric telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."

Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument-- that communication exists for the safety and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the system--would be heard again and again.

When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of the American Bell System often recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.

In Edwardian Britain, issues of cla.s.s and privacy were a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was considered outrageous that anyone--any wild fool off the street--could simply barge bellowing into one's office or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.

In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business, but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets, smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone operators were resented in Britain because they did not seem to "know their place." And no one of breeding would print a telephone number on a business card; this seemed a cra.s.s attempt to make the acquaintance of strangers.

But phone access in America was to become a popular right; something like universal suffrage, only more so.

American women could not yet vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning American women doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the American telephone was often commented on by foreigners.

Phones in America were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social, private, intimate, and domestic.

In America, Mother's Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone network.

The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among the foremost employers of American women.

They employed the daughters of the American middle-cla.s.s in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and--not least-- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas, where women operators, running extensive rural party-lines, enjoyed considerable social power. The operator knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.

They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap.

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers.

They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip.

The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.

And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.

This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the USA; from the beginning, the same was true of the British phone system. An early British commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also highly probable that under the early conditions of employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not always conducive to the best attention being given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."

So the boys were flung off the system--or at least, deprived of control of the switchboard. But the "adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and again.

The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death: "the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate.

On the contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.

The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a technological artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT.

The telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has become a technology that is visible only by its absence.

The telephone is technologically transparent.

The global telephone system is the largest and most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.

More remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely physically safe for the user.

For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.

In trying to understand what is happening to us today, with our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important to realize that our society has been through a similar challenge before-- and that, all in all, we did rather well by it.

Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends, in their own homes on their own telephones. The telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar of human community.

This has also happened, and is still happening, to computer networks. Computer networks such as NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause much head-scratching and have been described as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human community.

The words "community" and "communication" have the same root. Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as well. And whenever you TAKE AWAY that network--confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability-- then you hurt that community.

Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true of the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the 1980s--or rather, the VARIOUS electronic communities, in telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry manifestos.

None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.

Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and importance was the feeling--the COMMUNITY feeling-- that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in cybers.p.a.ce was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future.

These electronic communities, having flourished throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other, rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause celebre.