CRIME AND PUZZLEMENTbyJohn Perry Barlowbarlow@well.sf.ca.usDesperados of the DataSphere So me and my sidekick Howard,  we was sitting out in front of the 40 Rod Saloon one evening  when he all of a sudden says, "Lookee  here.  What do you reckon?"  I look up and there's these two strangers riding into town.  They're young and got kind of a restless, bored way about 'em.  A person don't  need both eyes to see they mean trouble...Well, that wasn't quite how it went.  Actually, Howard and I were floating blind as cave fish in the electronic barrens of the WELL, so the whole incident passed as words on a display screen:Howard:	Interesting couple of newusers just signed on.  One calls himself 	acid and the other's optik.Barlow:	Hmmm.  What are their real names?Howard:	Check their finger files.And so I typed !finger acid.  Several seconds later the WELL's Sequent computer sent the following message to my Macintosh in Wyoming:  	Login name: acid			In real life: Acid PhreakBy this, I knew that the WELL had a new resident and that his corporeal analog was supposedly called Acid Phreak.  Typing !finger optik yielded results of similar insufficiency, including the claim that someone, somewhere in the real world, was walking around calling himself Phiber Optik.  I doubted it.However, associating these sparse data with the knowledge that the WELL was about to host a conference on computers and security rendered the conclusion that I had made my first sighting of genuine computer crackers.  As the arrival of an outlaw was a major event to the settlements of the Old West, so was the appearance of crackers cause for stir on the WELL.  The WELL (or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is an example of the latest thing in frontier villages, the computer bulletin board.  In this kind of small town, Main Street is a central minicomputer to which (in the case of the WELL) as many as 64 microcomputers may be connected at one time by phone lines and little blinking boxes called modems.  In this silent world, all conversation is typed.  To enter it, one forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone.  You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but not what either they or their physical surroundings look like.  Town meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything from sexual kinks to depreciation schedules.  There are thousands of these nodes in the United States, ranging from PC clone hamlets of a few users to mainframe metros like CompuServe, with its 550,000 subscribers.  They are used by corporations to transmit memoranda and spreadsheets, universities to disseminate research, and a multitude of factions, from apiarists to Zoroastrians, for purposes unique to each.Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all connected to one another.  Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the Net.  It extends across that immense region of electron states, microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi writer William Gibson named Cyberspace.  Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the 19th Century West.  It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse (unless you happen to be a court stenographer), hard to get around in, and up for grabs.  Large institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to the point of sociopathy.  It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty.Recognizing this, Harper's Magazine decided in December, 1989 to hold one of its periodic Forums on the complex of issues surrounding computers, information, privacy, and electronic intrusion or "cracking."  Appropriately, they convened their conference in Cyberspace, using the WELL as the "site."Harper's invited an odd lot of about 40 participants.  These included: Clifford Stoll, whose book The Cuckoo's Egg details his cunning efforts to nab a German cracker.  John Draper or "Cap'n Crunch," the grand-daddy of crackers whose blue boxes got Wozniak and Jobs into consumer electronics.  Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly of Whole Earth fame.  Steven Levy, who wrote the seminal Hackers.  A retired Army colonel named Dave Hughes.  Lee Felsenstein, who designed the Osborne computer and was once called the "Robespierre of computing."  A UNIX wizard and former hacker named Jeff Poskanzer.  There was also a score of aging techno-hippies, the crackers, and me.What I was doing there was not precisely clear since I've spent most of my working years either pushing cows or song-mongering, but I at least brought to the situation a vivid knowledge of actual cow-towns,  having lived in or around one most of my life. That and a kind of innocence about both the technology and morality of Cyberspace which was soon to pass into the confusion of knowledge.At first, I was inclined toward sympathy with Acid 'n' Optik as well as their colleagues, Adelaide, Knight Lightning, Taran King, and Emmanuel.  I've always been more comfortable with outlaws than Republicans, despite having more certain credentials in the latter camp.  But as the Harper's Forum mushroomed into a boom-town of ASCII text (the participants typing 110,000 words in 10 days), I began to wonder.  These kids were fractious, vulgar, immature, amoral, insulting, and too damned good at their work.  Worse, they inducted a number of former kids like myself into Middle Age.  The long feared day had finally come when some gunsel would yank my beard and call me, too accurately, an old fart.  Under ideal circumstances, the blind gropings of bulletin board discourse force a kind of Noh drama stylization on human commerce.  Intemperate responses, or "flames" as they are called, are common even among conference participants who understand one another, which, it became immediately clear, the cyberpunks and techno-hippies did not. My own initial enthusiasm for the crackers wilted under a steady barrage of typed testosterone.  I quickly remembered I didn't know much about who they were, what they did, or how they did it.  I also remembered stories about crackers working in league with the Mob, ripping off credit card numbers and getting paid for them in (stolen) computer equipment. And I remembered Kevin Mitnik.  Mitnik, now 25, recently served federal time for a variety of computer and telephone related crimes.  Prior to incarceration, Mitnik was, by all accounts, a dangerous guy with a computer.  He disrupted phone company operations and arbitrarily disconnected the phones of celebrities.  Like the kid in Wargames, he broke into the North American Defense Command computer in Colorado Springs.  Unlike the kid in Wargames, he is reputed to have made a practice of destroying and altering data. There is even the (perhaps apocryphal) story that he altered the credit information of his probation officer and other enemies.  Digital Equipment claimed that his depredations cost them more than $4 million in computer downtime and file rebuilding.  Eventually, he was turned in by a friend who, after careful observation, had decided he was "a menace to society."   His spectre began to hang over the conference.  After several days of strained diplomacy, the discussion settled into a moral debate on the ethics of security and went critical. The techno-hippies were of the unanimous opinion that, in Dylan's words, one "must be honest to live outside the law."   But these young strangers apparently lived by no code save those with which they unlocked forbidden regions of the Net.  They appeared to think that improperly secured systems deserved to be violated and, by extension, that unlocked houses ought to be robbed.  This latter built particular heat in me since I refuse, on philosophical grounds, to lock my house. Civility broke down.  We began to see exchanges like:Dave Hughes:	Clifford Stoll said a wise thing that no one has 			commented on. That networks are 		built on trust. If they aren't, they should be.Acid Phreak:	Yeah. Sure.  And we should use the 'honor system' as a 		first line of security against hack attempts.Jef Poskanzer:	This guy down the street from me sometimes leaves his 		back door unlocked. I told him about it once, but he still 		does it.  If I had the chance to do it over, I would go in the 		back door, shoot him, and take all his money and 			consumer electronics.  It's the only way to get through to 		him.Acid Phreak:	Jef Poskanker (Puss?  Canker?  yechh)  Anyway, now 		when did you first start having these delusions where 		computer hacking was even *remotely* similar to 			murder? Presented with such a terrifying amalgam of raw youth and apparent power, we fluttered like a flock of indignant Babbitts around the Status Quo, defending it heartily.  One former hacker howled to the Harper's editor in charge of the forum, "Do you or do you not have names and addresses for these criminals?"  Though they had committed no obvious crimes, he was ready to call the police.  They finally got to me with:Acid: 		Whoever said they'd leave the door open to their house... 		where do you live?  (the address)  Leave it to me in mail if you 		like.I had never encountered anyone so apparently unworthy of my trust as these little nihilists.  They had me questioning a basic tenet, namely that the greatest security lies in vulnerability.  I decided it was time to put that principal to the test...  Barlow:		Acid. My house is at 372 North Franklin Street in 			Pinedale, Wyoming. If you're heading north on Franklin, 		you go about two blocks off the main drag before you run 		into hay meadow on the left. I've got the last house before 		the field. The computer is always on...		And is that really what you mean? Are you merely just 		the kind of little sneak that goes around looking for easy 		places to violate? You disappoint me, pal. For all your 		James Dean-On-Silicon rhetoric, you're not a cyberpunk. 		You're just a punk.Acid Phreak:	Mr. Barlow:  Thank you for posting all I need to get your 		credit information and a whole lot more!  Now, who is to 		blame?  ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!  		I think this should just about sum things up.Barlow:		Acid, if you've got a lesson to teach me, I hope it's not that 		it's idiotic to trust one's fellow man. Life on those terms 		would be endless and brutal. I'd try to tell you something 		about conscience, but I'd sound like Father O'Flannigan 		trying to reform the punk that's about to gutshoot him. 		For no more reason that to watch him die.		But actually, if you take it upon yourself to destroy my 		credit, you might do me a favor. I've been looking for 		something to put the brakes on my burgeoning			materialism.I spent a day wondering whether I was dealing with another Kevin Mitnik before the other shoe dropped:Barlow:		... With crackers like acid and optik, the issue is less 		intelligence than alienation.  Trade their modems for 		skateboards and only a slight conceptual shift would 		occur.Optik: 		You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with 		that of a skateboarder.  Hmmm...  This was indeed boring, 		but nonetheless:	At which point he downloaded my credit history.  Optik had hacked the core of TRW, an institution which has made my business (and yours) their business, extracting from it an abbreviated ( and incorrect) version of my personal financial life.  With this came the implication that he and Acid could and would revise it to my disadvantage if I didn't back off. I have since learned that while getting someone's TRW file is fairly