The Hacker Crackdown Part 40

The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from small-town Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over the world.

Barlow found the social milieu of computing attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to San Francisco to network with Deadhead friends. There Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the Californian computer community, including friendships among the wilder spirits at Apple.

In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of the FBI.

The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.

Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of federal attention.

He had to struggle to explain the very nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling.

Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community.

The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a suspect group called the Hackers Conference.

The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts.

The hackers of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do with the hackers of the digital underground. On the contrary, the hackers of this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs.

(This group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers"

most likely to react with militant fury at any criminal degradation of the term "hacker.")

Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though his computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled by this anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.

Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the Point Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort.

Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and mult.i.tudinous.

Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the Whole Earth Catalog. This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The Whole Earth Catalog, and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a National Book Award.

With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the Whole Earth Catalog had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, CoEvolution Quarterly, the Point Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."

CoEvolution Quarterly, which started in 1974, was never a widely popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor, CoEvolution Quarterly failed to revolutionize Western civilization and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian paradigms.

Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness. CoEvolution Quarterly carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of mouth.

It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers.

And yet--it never seemed to shrink much, either.

Year in, year out, decade in, decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the magazine.

The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").

But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by.

Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, CoEvolution Quarterly suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered the computer revolution. Out came the Whole Earth Software Catalog of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of digital counterculture. CoEvolution Quarterlyfolded its teepee, replaced by Whole Earth Software Review and eventually by Whole Earth Review (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold).

1985 saw the birth of the "WELL"--the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link."

The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.

As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and remained one. It was local to San Francisco.

It was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. Its complex UNIX-based software might be most charitably described as "user-opaque." It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit cultural foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed with fans of the Grateful Dead.

Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.

Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings") were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended to work in the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications, media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and journalists were especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."

There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft.

No one used handles. Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his credit card numbers.

The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum for access and storage, and lost money for years--but not enough to hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a gigantic cybers.p.a.ce smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that could last for months or years on end.

In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:

CONFERENCES ON THE WELL

WELL "Screenzine" Digest (g zine)

Best of the WELL - vintage material - (g best)

Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops)

Business - Education ----------------------

Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri) Brainstorming (g brain) Cla.s.sifieds (g cla) Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult) Consumers (g cons) Design (g design) Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g disability) Education (g ed) Energy (g energy91) Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g home) Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g invest) Kids91 (g kids) Legal (g legal) One Person Business (g one) Periodical/newsletter (g per) Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future (g fut) Translators (g trans) Travel (g tra) Work (g work)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff) Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp) Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)

Social - Political - Humanities ---------------------------------

Aging (g gray) AIDS (g aids) Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g arc) Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g wonderland) Christian (g cross) Couples (g couples) Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g dream) Drugs (g dru) East Coast (g east) Emotional Health@@@@ (g private) Erotica (g eros) Environment (g env) Firearms (g firearms) First Amendment (g first) Fringes of Reason (g fringes) Gay (g gay) Gay (Private)# (g gaypriv) Geography (g geo) German (g german) Gulf War (g gulf) Hawaii (g aloha) Health (g heal) History (g hist) Holistic (g holi) Interview (g inter) Italian (g ital) Jewish (g jew) Liberty (g liberty) Mind (g mind) Miscellaneous (g misc) Men on the WELL@@ (g mow) Network Integration (g origin) Nonprofits (g non) North Bay (g north) Northwest (g nw) Pacific Rim (g pacrim) Parenting (g par) Peace (g pea) Peninsula (g pen) Poetry (g poetry) Philosophy (g phi) Politics (g pol) Psychology (g psy) Psychotherapy (g therapy) Recovery## (g recovery) San Francisco (g sanfran) Scams (g scam) s.e.xuality (g s.e.x) Singles (g singles) Southern (g south) Spanish (g spanish) Spirituality (g spirit) Tibet (g tibet) Transportation (g transport) True Confessions (g tru) Unclear (g unclear) WELL Writer's Workshop@@@(g www) Whole Earth (g we) Women on the WELL@(g wow) Words (g words) Writers (g wri)

@@@@Private Conference - mail wooly for entry @@@Private conference - mail sonia for entry @@Private conference - mail flash for entry @ Private conference - mail reva for entry # Private Conference - mail hudu for entry ## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry

Arts - Recreation - Entertainment ----------------------------------- ArtCom Electronic Net (g acen) Audio-Videophilia (g aud) Bicycles (g bike) Bay Area Tonight@@(g bat) Boating (g wet) Books (g books) CD's (g cd) Comics (g comics) Cooking (g cook) Flying (g flying) Fun (g fun) Games (g games) Gardening (g gard) Kids (g kids) Nightowls@ (g owl) Jokes (g jokes) MIDI (g midi) Movies (g movies) Motorcycling (g ride) Motoring (g car) Music (g mus) On Stage (g onstage) Pets (g pets) Radio (g rad) Restaurant (g rest) Science Fiction (g sf) Sports (g spo) Star Trek (g trek) Television (g tv) Theater (g theater) Weird (g weird) Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5) @Open from midnight to 6am @@Updated daily

Grateful Dead ------------- Grateful Dead (g gd) Deadplan@ (g dp) Deadlit (g deadlit) Feedback (g feedback) GD Hour (g gdh) Tapes (g tapes) Tickets (g tix) Tours (g tours)

@Private conference - mail tnf for entry

Computers ----------- AI/Forth/Realtime (g realtime) Amiga (g amiga) Apple (g app) Computer Books (g cbook) Art & Graphics (g gra) Hacking (g hack) HyperCard (g hype) IBM PC (g ibm) LANs (g lan) Laptop (g lap) Macintosh (g mac) Mactech (g mactech) Microtimes (g microx) Muchomedia (g mucho) NeXt (g next) OS/2 (g os2) Printers (g print) Programmer's Net (g net) Siggraph (g siggraph) Software Design (g sdc) Software/Programming (g software) Software Support (g ssc) Unix (g unix) Windows (g windows) Word Processing (g word)

Technical - Communications ---------------------------- Bioinfo (g bioinfo) Info (g boing) Media (g media) NAPLPS (g naplps) Netweaver (g netweaver) Networld (g networld) Packet Radio (g packet) Photography (g pho) Radio (g rad) Science (g science) Technical Writers (g tec) Telecommunications(g tele) Usenet (g usenet) Video (g vid) Virtual Reality (g vr)

The WELL Itself --------------- Deeper (g deeper) Entry (g ent) General (g gentech) Help (g help) Hosts (g hosts) Policy (g policy) System News (g news) Test (g test)

The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life confessions with bis.e.xual word-processing Tibetans.

But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each of these conferences was a little cybers.p.a.ce world in itself, comprising dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics. Each conference was commonly frequented by a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few dozen people.

It was humanly impossible to encompa.s.s the entire Well (especially since access to the Well's mainframe computer was billed by the hour).

Most long-time users contented themselves with a few favorite topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere for a taste of exotica. But especially important news items, and hot topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire Well community.

Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry Barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead, ranked prominently among them. It was here on the Well that Barlow posted his true-life tale of computer-crime encounter with the FBI.

The story, as might be expected, created a great stir. The Well was already primed for hacker controversy. In December 1989, Harper's magazine had hosted a debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit computer intrusion.

While over forty various computer-mavens took part, Barlow proved a star in the debate. So did "Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik," a pair of young New York hacker-phreaks whose skills at telco switching-station intrusion were matched only by their apparently limitless hunger for fame.

The advent of these two boldly swaggering outlaws in the precincts of the Well created a sensation akin to that of Black Panthers at a c.o.c.ktail party for the radically chic.

Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990.