consultant in Baltimore whose sole means of supporting herself and her 18 year old son was stripped away early one morning.  Secret Service agents broke down her door with sledge hammers, entered with guns drawn, and seized all her computer equipment.  Apparently her son had also been using it...Or the father in New York who opened the door at 6:00 AM and found a shotgun at his nose.  A dozen agents entered.  While one of the kept the man's wife in a choke-hold, the rest made ready to shoot and entered the bedroom of their sleeping 14 year-old.  Before leaving, they confiscated every piece of electronic equipment in the house, including all the telephones.It was enough to suggest that the insurance companies should start writing policies against capricious governmental seizure of circuitry. In fairness, one can imagine the government's problem.  This is all pretty magical stuff  to them.  If I were trying to terminate the operations of a witch coven, I'd probably seize everything in sight.  How would I tell the ordinary household brooms from the getaway vehicles?But as I heard more and more about the vile injustices being heaped on my young pals in the Legion of Doom, not to mention the unfortunate folks nearby, the less I was inclined toward such temperate thoughts as these.  I drifted back into a 60's-style sense of the government, thinking it a thing of monolithic and evil efficiency and adopting an up-against-the-wall willingness to spit words like "pig" or "fascist" into my descriptions. In doing so, I endowed the Secret Service with a clarity of intent which no agency of government will ever possess.  Despite almost every experience I've ever had with federal authority, I keep imagining its competence.  For some reason, it was easier to invest the Keystone Kapers of Operation Sun Devil with malign purpose rather than confront their absurdity straight-on.  There is, after all, a twisted kind of comfort in political paranoia.  It provides one such a sense of orderliness to think that the government is neither crazy nor stupid and that its plots, though wicked, are succinct.I was about to have an experience which would restore both my natural sense of unreality and my unwillingness to demean the motives of others.  I was about to see first hand the disorientation of the law in the featureless vastness of Cyberspace.     ********In Search of NuPrometheus"I pity the poor immigrant..."--	Bob DylanSometime last June, an angry hacker got hold of a chunk of the highly secret source code which drives the Apple Macintosh.  He then distributed it to a variety of addresses, claiming responsibility for this act of information terrorism in the name of the Nu  Prometheus League.Apple freaked.  NuPrometheus had stolen, if not the Apple crown jewels, at least a stone from them.  Worse, NuPrometheus had then given this prize away.  Repeatedly.All Apple really has to offer the world is the software which lies encoded in silicon on the ROM chip of every Macintosh.  This set of instructions is the cyber-DNA which makes a Macintosh a Macintosh.  Worse, much of the magic in this code was put there by people who not only do not work for Apple any longer, but might only do so again if encouraged with cattle prods.  Apple's attitude toward its ROM code is a little like that of a rich kid toward his inheritance.  Not actually knowing how to create wealth himself, he guards what he has with hysterical fervor.Time passed, and I forgot about the incident.  But one recent May morning, I leaned that others had not.  The tireless search for the spectral heart of NuPrometheus finally reached Pinedale, Wyoming, where I was the object of a two hour interview by Special Agent Richard Baxter, Jr.  of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Poor Agent Baxter didn't know a ROM chip from a Vise-grip when he arrived, so much of that time was spent trying to educate him on the nature of the thing which had been stolen.  Or whether "stolen" was the right term for what had happened to it.     You know things have rather jumped the groove when potential suspects must explain to law enforcers the nature of their alleged perpetrations.  I wouldn't swear Agent Baxter ever got it quite right.  After I showed him some actual source code, gave a demonstration of e-mail in action, and downloaded a file  from the WELL, he took to rubbing his face with both hands, peering up over his finger tips and saying, "It sure is something, isn't it"  Or, "Whooo-ee." Or "my eight year-old knows more about these things than I do."  He didn't say this with a father's pride so much as an immigrant's fear of a strange new land into which he will be forcibly moved and in which his own child is a native.  He looked across my keyboard into Cyberspace and didn't like what he saw.We could have made it harder for one another, but I think we each sensed that the other occupied a world which was as bizarre and nonsensical as it could be. We did our mutual best to suppress immune response at the border.You'd have thought his world might have been a little more recognizable to me.  Not so, it turns out.  Because in his world, I found several unfamiliar features, including these: 1.	The Hacker's Conference is an underground organization of computer outlaws with likely connections to, and almost certainly sympathy with, the NuPrometheus League.  (Or as Agent Baxter repeatedly put it, the "New Prosthesis League.")   2.	John Draper, the affore-mentioned Cap'n Crunch, in addition to being a known member of the Hacker's Conference, is also CEO and president of Autodesk, Inc.  This is of particular concern to the  FBI because Autodesk has many top-secret contracts with the government to supply Star Wars graphics imaging and "hyperspace" technology.  Worse, Draper is thought to have Soviet contacts.He wasn't making this up.  He had lengthy documents from the San Francisco office to prove it.  And in which Autodesk's address was certainly correct.  On the other hand, I know John Draper. While, as I say, he may have once distinguished himself as a cracker during the Pleistocene, he is not now, never has been, and never will be CEO of Autodesk.  He did work there for awhile last year, but he was let go long before he got in a position to take over.Nor is Autodesk, in my experience with it, the Star Wars skunk works which Agent Baxter's documents indicated.  One could hang out there a long time without ever seeing any gold braid.  Their primary product is something called AutoCAD, by far the most popular computer-aided design software but generally lacking in lethal potential.  They do have a small development program in Cyberspace, which is what they call Virtual Reality.  (This, I assume is the "hyperspace" to which Agent Baxter's documents referred.)However, Autodesk had reduced its Cyberspace program to a couple of programmers. I imagined Randy Walser and Carl Tollander toiling away in the dark and lonely service of their country.  Didn't work.  Then I tried to describe Virtual Reality to Agent Baxter, but that didn't work either.  In fact, he tilted.  I took several runs at it, but I could tell I was violating our border agreements. These seemed to include a requirement that neither of us try to drag the other across into his conceptual zone.I fared a little better on the Hacker's Conference.  Hardly a conspiracy, the Hacker's Conference is an annual convention originated in 1984 by the Point Foundation and the editors of Whole Earth Review.  Each year it invites about a hundred of the most gifted and accomplished of digital creators. Indeed, they are the very people who have conducted the personal computer revolution.  Agent Baxter looked at my list of Hacker's Conference attendees and read their bios.    "These are the people who actually design this stuff, aren't they?"  He was incredulous.  Their corporate addresses didn't fit his model of outlaws at all well.Why had he come all the way to Pinedale to investigate a crime he didn't understand which had taken place (sort of) in 5 different places, none of which was within 500 miles?Well, it seems Apple has told the FBI that they can expect little cooperation from Hackers in and around the Silicon Valley, owing to virulent anti-Apple sentiment there.  They claim this is due to the Hacker belief that software should be free combined with festering resentment of Apple's commercial success.  They advised the FBI to question only those Hackers who were as far as possible from the twisted heart of the subculture.They did have their eye on some local people though.  These included a couple of former Apple employees, Grady Ward and Water Horat, Chuck Farnham (who has made a living out of harassing Apple), Glenn Tenney (the purported leader of the Hackers), and, of course, the purported CEO of Autodesk.Other folks Agent Baxter asked me about included Mitch Kapor, who wrote Lotus 1-2-3 and was  known to have received some this mysterious source code.  Or whatever.  But I had also met Mitch Kapor, both on the WELL and in person.  A less likely computer terrorist would be hard to come by. Actually, the question of the source code was another area where worlds but shadow-boxed.  Although Agent Baxter didn't know source code from Tuesday, he did know that Apple Computer had told his agency that what had been stolen and disseminated was the complete recipe for a Macintosh computer.  The distribution of this secret formula might result in the creation of millions of Macintoshes not made by Apple.  And, of course, the ruination of Apple Computer.  In my world, NuPrometheus (whoever they, or more likely, he might be) had distributed a small portion of the code which related specifically to Color QuickDraw.  QuickDraw is Apple's name for the software which controls the Mac's on-screen graphics.  But this was another detail which  Agent Baxter could not capture.  For all he knew, you could grow Macintoshes from floppy disks.  I explained to him that Apple was alleging something like the ability to assemble an entire human being from the recipe for a foot, but even he know the analogy was inexact.  And trying to get him to accept the idea that a corporation could go mad with suspicion was quite futile.  He had a far different perception of the emotional reliability of institutions.When he finally left, we were both dazzled and disturbed.  I spent some time thinking about Lewis Carroll and tried to return to writing about the legal persecution of the Legion of Doom.  But my heart wasn't in it.  I found myself suddenly too much in sympathy with Agent Baxter and his struggling colleagues from Operation Sun Devil to get back into a proper sort of pig-bashing mode.  Given what had happened to other innocent bystanders like Steve Jackson, I gave some thought to getting scared.  But this was Kafka in a clown suit.  It wasn't precisely frightening.  I also took some comfort in a phrase once applied to the administration of Frederick the Great: "Despotism tempered by incompetence."  Of course, incompetence is a double-edged banana.  While we may know this new territory better than the authorities, they have us literally out-gunned.  One should pause before making well-armed paranoids feel foolish, no matter how foolish they seem.    ******   The Fear of White Noise"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."--	Sigmund Freud,	appearing to me in a dreamI'm a member of that half of the human race which is inclined to divide the human race into two kinds of people.  My dividing line runs between the people who crave certainty and the people who trust chance. You can draw this one a number of ways, of course, like Control vs. Serendipity, Order vs. Chaos, Hard answers vs. Silly questions, or Newton, Descartes & Aquinas vs. Heisenberg, Mandelbrot & the Dalai Lama.  Etc. Large organizations and their drones huddle on one end of my scale, busily trying to impose predictable homogeneity on messy